With an accelerating trend among growers to tackle at least some weeds by mechanical means, established tillage equipment manufacturers have been scrambling to get a foothold in the market.

While Horsch and, most recently, Sumo have developed their own products, others have bought existing ranges – Amazone (with Schmotzer) and Lemken (Steketee) were among the first to take this approach and Pottinger ecently snapped up a fellow-Austrian specialist in the field.

Now, Kverneland Group and Vaderstad are getting in on the act by each acquiring a ready-made inter-row product range featuring mechanical and vision-based guidance technology.

See also: Buyer’s guide: Camera-guided sugar beet hoes

KV bags BC Technique

Kverneland’s purchase of French manufacturer BC Technique brings it the Phenix Agrosystem range, which includes Helios star-wheel rotary hoes and Onyx row-specific tine hoes with working widths from 3m to 12m.

When equipped with isobus and the X-Control parallelogram, the Onyx hoes can exploit satellite-based section control to automatically raise and lower individual weeding assemblies wherever crop rows merge.

Kverneland says the high-precision capability is good enough for hoeing weeds out of cereal crops grown at row widths down to 125mm.

Automatic hoe steering is provided by the Lynx interface with a colour scanning camera for use with any existing hoe, while the more advanced X-Green guidance interface is equipped with up to two colour scanning cameras.

Swedes go Danish

Vaderstad is buying the inter-row hoe business of Thyregod, a Danish manufacturer that also makes sugar beet harvesters, trailers and stone picking equipment.

The 3m to 9m tractor-mounted TRV and up to 18m trailed TRV Swingking implements developed over the past 25 years can have manual or automatic section control via GPS and isobus to avoid damaging crop by lifting and lowering segments at angled headlands.

The Thyregod hoe range includes trailed models up to 18m wide © Vaderstad

Mechanical auto-steering and optical guidance using up to two row-finding colour cameras – or a camera for each hoeing frame – can be used to deliver sufficient accuracy to work in cereal crops at 125mm row spacing, as well as row crops such as maize, says Vaderstad.

The Thyregod hoes will complement the Swedish manufacturer’s Tempo large seed planter and the Proceed precision cereal-sowing technology; it will take over the hoes business from June, with a switch to Vaderstad branding scheduled for a year later.