# Cotton Weeds Next Target for See & Spray

Author: Jim Steadman
Published: 2017-04-03
Canonical URL: https://www.cottongrower.com/crop-inputs/precision-agriculture/cotton-weeds-next-target-for-see-spray/

---

**From *Cotton Grower* Magazine – March 2017**

“I’ve literally been told by farmers, ‘I’ve been dreaming about a machine like this’,” says Jorge Heraud, CEO of [Blue River Technologies](http://www.bluerivert.com/).

“This” is the company’s [See & Spray machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I6mSQK4aPI), which does just what it says it does: sprays weeds and leaves crops alone.

Heraud, a former director of engineering for Trimble who helped to develop autosteer, is in Blue River’s office/workshop deep in Silicon Valley, but his sights already are on the mid-summer Cotton Belt, where See & Spray will be trialed and offered for 2018 delivery.

For pigweed-weary cotton producers, See & Spray’s assembly of tech-industry gifts like image recognition, machine learning, and artificial intelligence offers a vision of a weed-free heaven. The sprayer just might contribute to a resurgence of non-glyphosate herbicides at rates that are a fraction of conventional applications.

But in the meantime, Blue River fine-tunes its technology, upping the machine’s effective speed from 2 mph to 4 mph this year, and then on to a goal of a more typical 6 mph. “This is the way we should farm,” Heraud says. “Chemicals are very useful tools. But they’re best when you use them when you need them: to kill the weed.”