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Eliminating Manual Plant Stand Counts

Eliminating Manual Plant Stand Counts

Learn how SWAT CAM can be used to identify and evaluate crop establishment in your field.

By Haley BilokraIy
Farms.com Intern

Is it possible to understand your field more and make better decisions without wasting valuable time?

Derek Rude, Vice President of Research and Development at Croptimistic Technology Inc., explained at the 2022 Western Precision Agriculture Conference and Ag Technology Showcase in November 2022 that this is possible using SWAT CAM.

SWAT CAM is used to create crop and weed leaf area maps and should eventually eliminate the need for manual plant stand counts.

No extra time or labour is required to generate these maps because the SWAT CAM is installed on sprayer booms and images are automatically captured every 50 to 70 feet. While these photos are used to instantly generate crop and weed maps, they can also be accessed at any time to view crop progress without travelling to the field.

The current model of SWAT CAM can identify wheat, barley, oats, durum, canola, peas, potatoes, corn, soybean, lentil, flax, dry bean, edible bean, and kochia.

Future updates to SWAT CAM will include the ability to do plant stand counts for canola, soybean and corn. It will also be able to estimate bare soil and residue cover.

Get a sneak peek at SWAT CAM and it's many uses by wathcing the video below.




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Border View Farms is a mid-sized family farm that sits on the Ohio-Michigan border. My name is Nathan. I make and edit all of the videos posted here. I farm with my dad, Mark and uncle, Phil. We also have a part-time employee, Brock. My dad started the farm in 1980. Since then we have grown the operation from just a couple hundred acres to over 3,000. Watch my 500th video for a history of our farm I filmed with my dad.

I started making these videos in the fall of 2019 as a way to help show what I do on a daily basis as a farmer. Agriculture is different from any other industry and I believe the more people that are showing their small piece of agriculture, helps to build our story. We face unique challenges and stressful situations but have some of the most rewarding payoffs in the end. I get to spend everyday doing what I love, raising my kids on the farm, and trying to push our farm to be better every year. I hope that I can address questions or concerns that you might have about farms and agriculture.

I hope you enjoy my content and ask questions as you have them. I do my best to answer anything I can. Thanks for watching!