HARDI LAUNCHES GeoSelect on Trailers
Australian primary producers can now have highly sophisticated weed targeting technology on their trailed crop sprayers.
Adelaide-based sprayer manufacturer and importer HARDI AUSTRALIA today announced that their locally developed GeoSelect spot spraying system would be offered on trailed sprayers, starting with the popular COMMANDER.
HARDI’s National Sales Manager Zac Harnett says offering GeoSelect on the company’s most popular trailed sprayers will be great news for farmers.
“The COMMANDER is hugely popular with grain producers, pastoralists and vegetable growers, as well as broadacre operators,” he says.
“We are very pleased to be able to help all those farmers reduce their herbicide usage and costs by up to 90 percent in every paddock.”
Unlike many spot spraying systems, GeoSelect adds very little extra hardware and weight to the spray boom. Instead of heavy and vulnerable cameras, there are just four GNSS units that continually geolocate the spray nozzles with centimetre accuracy.
This means there is virtually no change in boom performance and the system can be easily disabled for blanket spraying of fungicides and liquid fertilisers.
GeoSelect programming begins with a drone or aircraft pre-scan of the paddock. A weed geolocation database is created and transferred to the software, which calculates how much chemical will be needed in the tank, recommends the tractor’s optimum spraying speed at each point in the paddock, and controls individual spray nozzles along the boom to target weeds.
“HARDI has an advantage in our incredibly fast and precise ActivAir nozzle switching technology, so the computer can very accurately open nozzles as they pass over a weed and close them immediately afterwards,” Mr Harnett says.
HARDI Australia CEO Bill Franklin says having GeoSelect on HARDI trailed sprayers will allow even more Australian growers to reduce their chemical usage by up to 90 percent.
“The current high cost of chemicals and the lasting benefits of putting less herbicide into the environment mean GeoSelect delivers growers a double saving and a huge return on investment,” he says.
“It means spraying can be done in less time, at less cost and with far less chemical.
“The accuracy and efficiency of GeoSelect makes the HARDI trailed sprayer range a logical fit for this new technology.”
COMMANDER trailed sprayers are offered with 6500, 8500 and 10,000 litre main tank capacity and boom sizes from 30 metres to 48.5 metres.