This last Saturday during KTAR’s Rosie on the House cotton was our topic, an agriculture commodity we revisit each year since it is one of Arizona’s 5 C’s and certainly an agriculture crop to be celebrated. Our guest this year on the show was Buckeye farmer, Todd Rovey, an active board member of the Arizona Cotton Growers and member of the Arizona Farm Bureau.

While we could have talked for another few hours during the one-hour Farm Fresh segment we covered lots of ground. A few areas, like technology, are interesting enough to have a full discussion on this topic alone.

Many in the industry, including Rovey, consider “detect and spray” systems to be some of the most exciting technologies in agriculture right now. Herbicide resistance is a challenge for most crops including cotton, so new approaches to weed control are being investigated and one is the “detect and spray” system. The most recognized one is the see and spray from John Deere, the idea is to target only weeds actually in the field, reduce herbicide use, protect and improve crop yields, and save money. This helps avoid traditional broadcast spraying. More than 25 companies have “detect and spray” systems in some stage of commercial development. These successful technology efforts will protect agriculture's crop yields while being extremely targeted with weed eradication.

Taking it to the next level, nearly a dozen companies are evaluating the use of lasers to target weeds. The most successful laser system is from Carbon Robotics which uses machine vision and lasers to target weeds. According to cotton industry sources, Carbon Robotics received another 70 million dollars in funding proving the industry’s commitment to advances in this technology. A connection to Arizona and Cotton Incorporated is that the University of Arizona engineers have evaluated the suitability of some advanced weed control technologies for cotton on a “detect and till” system that detects the weeds and then removes them by mechanical tillage.

In the meantime, during the show, Rovey shared his own road to selecting farming as his career choice. Of course, it helped that he comes from a generational farm family. But you’ll want to hear his family history and what farming means to him in the radio segment below. It’s the full show commercial-free.