On a fallow or pre-emergence pass, most of what's under the boom is bare ground. You're paying for chemical, fuel, and time to treat dirt, because a sprayer has always hit everything evenly, weed or not.
So we asked: what if the sprayer only sprayed the weeds?
That's FarmDefender™ Weed. Cameras along the boom watch the ground, and on-board AI picks out the weeds against bare soil and fires only the nozzles that need to fire. The weeds get sprayed; the rest of the field stays dry.
Up to 90% less herbicide — honestly
Spray only the weeds on mostly empty ground and most of your tank is still full at the end — up to 90% herbicide reduction in those conditions.
How much you save depends on your weed pressure: thin fallow, a lot; a thick flush, less. But you never spray more than blanket coverage — fewer gallons bought, fewer acres of drift and overlap, less chemical on plants you never meant to hit.
How it actually works
The cameras feed live images into a small AI accelerator on the machine, trained to tell a weed from the soil around it. It decides in a fraction of a second, well before the plant passes under the boom — no cloud, no cell signal, no round-trip to a server.
Two things make that matter:
- Individual nozzle control, not section control. The one nozzle that sees a weed fires. Its neighbors over clean ground stay closed.
- It runs at real speed. Up to 10 mph, day or night, and it drives your PWM nozzle control (CapstanAg PinPoint III or ARAG FlowTron), so it drops onto the sprayer you already run.
The records come free
Every pass logs itself: each detection GPS-mapped, every nozzle firing recorded, and the as-applied data flowing straight into FarmIQ™. You get real numbers — what got sprayed, where, and how much product stayed in the tank — for compliance and an honest ROI conversation instead of a brochure estimate.
Where it earns its keep
Spot spraying shines where the ground is mostly empty: fallow and pre-emergence, chem-fallow, burndown ahead of the crop. It's live on customer booms now — first season, real acres, not a pilot.
It's built in Montana. We sell it direct, commission it ourselves, and when you call, you get the people who built it.
Tired of paying to spray dirt? See how FarmDefender Weed works, look at the whole platform at farmdefender.us, or tell us your boom width and what you're fighting — we'll give you a straight answer.