Buyers willing to fling big bucks at Kverneland’s latest iXtrack trailed sprayers to ease filling and improve application accuracy have several new options to consider.

One is Teffen’s £3,000 closed transfer filling system. This allows operators to extract the exact volume of neat chemical required without manning a manual tap and, crucially, risking undue exposure to plant protection products.

See also: SoilEssentials’ Skai spot-sprayer cuts chemical use in pastures

Then there’s the green-on-green patch spraying system from Norwegian firm DAT.

It features a series of cameras – one every 3m for maximum resolution – to monitor the field and trigger applications at speeds of 10-12kph.

Rather than single-nozzle control, the system opens and closes sections of the boom – the theory being than weeds generally grow in clumps.

The Ecopatch software is currently geared up to detect grass and broadleaved weeds in cereals, with algorithms for other crops in the works.

According to Kverneland, it can as much as halve chemical use and increase yields by up to 5% by leaving clean crop herbicide-free.

This should go some way to offsetting the punchy £12,000-a-camera list price.