John Deere Wrap from the Consumer Electronics Show 2020

The world’s largest technology event, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) just wrapped up in Las Vegas. John Deere was back at the event this year exhibiting their R4038 self-propelled sprayer equipped with advanced technology and fitted with an ultra-wide 120-foot carbon-fiber boom.

Deere exhibited for the first time at CES 2019 to identify and promote current and potential new technologies to agriculture that will enhance farm productivity, profitability and sustainability. The Deere presence highlights the important role that technology plays in helping to feed a growing world population.

The John Deere booth showed off new sprayer nozzle technology designed to respond instantly to changes in wind to reduce drift by modulating droplet size.

Deere let the sprayer do the talking of how much tech is contained in a single piece of ag equipment. Self-driving, remote sensing, GPS, precision imaging, machine learning – it’s all there in the R4038 self-propelled sprayer.

The machines have 30 mounted cameras to capture photos of plants every 50 milliseconds and process them through its on-board 25 Jetson AGX Xavier supercomputing modules. Image recognition algorithms need to decide whether images fed from the 30 cameras are a weed or crop plant quicker than the blink of an eye. That allows enough time for 200 robotic precision sprayers — to zap each weed individually with herbicide.

The Jetson can be used to run interference on machine learning algorithms and to decide on the fly if a plant is a crop or a weed, and spray only the weeds, which will reduce the cost of expensive herbicides. A farmer spending a quarter-million dollars a year on herbicides was able to reduce that expense by 80 percent according to one report.

"It's a great chance for those in the tech industry to visit with them and to learn more about how their food is produced and the important role technology plays and will continue to play in putting food on their tables," said Laurel Caes, public relations manager for John Deere.