Fields Full of Weeds, Meet the Sprayer That Sees Them All

See & Spray Gen 2 brings 4x weed accuracy and real-time variable rate to North American farms

15 May 2026

John Deere has deployed the second generation of its See & Spray system across farms in North America, offering four times the weed detection accuracy of its predecessor and the ability to adjust chemical application rates on the fly, without any pre-season mapping.

A redesigned camera array operates at speeds of up to 16 miles per hour, distinguishing crops from weeds across a wider range of plants including wheat, barley, canola, peanuts, and sugar beets, alongside existing coverage of corn, cotton, and soybeans. A repositioned centre-frame camera reduces dust interference, a persistent problem in open-field spraying.

Removing prescription map requirements is the development with the broadest commercial significance. Variable rate application previously required soil sampling before the season began, third-party software, and manual data uploads. Now, real-time readings from the machine itself handle all of that automatically.

For mid-scale operations, which have historically found precision agriculture tools difficult to adopt, this is a meaningful shift. Retrofit availability for machines built as far back as 2018 removes the need to purchase new equipment.

According to BCC Research analysis published in May 2026, the system has already been used on 5 million acres across North America.

With input costs continuing to pressure farm margins, plant-level chemical targeting reflects a broader shift in US agriculture toward lower-input production. Whether regulatory trends or commodity price movements will accelerate or slow further adoption remains an open question.