WEED-IT: 91-year-old farmer saves thousands with high-tech sprayer

Peter Whykes is still a primary sprayer operator on his family’s Mallee cropping property, and swears by this cutting-edge machine.

At 91, Peter Whykes could be excused for easing up on farm jobs, but he and son Chris are the primary sprayer operators on their family’s busy cropping property in Victoria’s Mallee.

Three generations of the Whykes family work their 4700ha dryland farm west of Charlton using direct-drill or minimum tillage, producing barley, wheat, canola, lentils, peas, fava beans, lupins, vetch and oaten hay.

Peter and Chris have recently taken delivery of a new self-propelled Croplands RoGator 1300C with WEED-IT spot spray technology through Precise Farm Solutions at St Arnaud.

Having previously owned a 6000-litre RoGator 1300B, they were keen to upgrade to the 7000-litre C Series machine.

“We bought the first RoGator in this area,” Peter said.

“It’s a great machine with a strong boom, plus we ordered the new one with WEED-IT sensors to reduce our chemical usage.

“We’ll mainly use spot-spraying to apply glyphosate and paraquat during the summer fallow prior to sowing and the sprayer has done a good job – we were able to target weeds with the sensors while operating at 17-18km/h.”

Chris’s brother, Jon, estimates the WEED-IT spot-spraying technology will reduce their chemical use during summer and autumn by 50-80 per cent.

“We would have saved $100,000 if we had used the WEED-IT over the whole summer,” he said.

“We did one job for a neighbour on contract and used 30 per cent of the amount of chemical we anticipated.”

Jon said they had found it easy to prime the boom, with an agitator in the tank working continuously to ensure there was no delay when spraying started.

The machine’s Capstan PINPOINT2 Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) technology regulates the application rate independent of pressure and enables control of every nozzle individually, including full-turn compensation, with nozzles constantly switching on and off up to 50 times per second.

“With the previous system, lifting the spray rate meant the pump sped up and the increased pressure put out a bigger volume of chemical, encouraging spray drift.

“Now, you put in the preselected application rate and pressure and, as the speed of the sprayer varies, the pulsing rate of the nozzles adjusts to maintain both.

“You know that 99 per cent of the droplets are the right size to hit the target.

“Another big step-up with our new RoGator is the auto-fold function for the boom, with a single button you push to fold out or in.

“It also has two automatic cruise controls – you select the work and turning speeds and just switch between them.”

Croplands Southern Regional Manager Steve Ross said deliveries of the new machines were shipped from the manufacturer in Minnesota (US) to three distribution points in Australia – Perth, Toowoomba and St Arnaud.

“We would have sold 75 of these units around Central Victoria alone,” he said.

“We’re seeing a big swing in the market towards WEED-IT these days, particularly on self-propelled machines, thanks to its accuracy, cost savings and minimising of resistance.”

Pricing on the 1300C starts from $700,000, plus GST.

croplands.com.au