New camera improves detection of hues of blue

Jun 29, 2023

Lemken introduces the new IC-Light+ camera control, which also detects the near-infrared range, for its Steketee hoeing machines. The new camera control makes detection easier in crops with a high proportion of blue in the leaves. This offers clear advantages in mechanical weed control, especially in the cultivation of onions, leeks, broccoli or red cabbage.

The internally developed standard IC-Light camera system in LEMKEN Steketee hoeing machines captures the RGB colour range and reliably distinguishes between hues of green and red. Thanks to its self-learning mode, the system continuously develops as it is being used. The new IC-Light+ camera now also captures hues of blue as well, allowing even very young plants or plants with a particularly fine structure to be better identified and shown. The camera easily handles even onions the size of a pin.

The IC-Light+ camera is operated via the IC-Light terminal and allows hoeing as close as two centimetres from crop plants at forward speeds of up to 15 km/h. The camera detects up to five rows of plants at a time and controls the steering of the hoeing machine between the rows.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids