A field experiment was carried out in sugar beet with a wide-span (12.2 m) tractor and laser guided implements. By means of a side-shift facility, implements were mounted on this vehicle for seedbed preparation, drilling, fertilizing, spraying and hoeing. Automatic laser guidance was possible with an accuracy of 0.6 em on a track length of 220m on arable land.No inputs (soil cultivation, fertilizer, herbicide) were made at places where they were not needed, or even would potentially pollute the environment. The aim of the experiment, which was carried out in 2 successive years on fields of the same farm, was to investigate the influence on weed occurrence and efficiency of weed control.Leaving out seedbed preparation between the future crop rows left already germinated weeds alive. In 1 year pre-emergence application of paraquat-diquat was necessary to stop growing of well developed weed plants. A crumbling operation had to be carried out to break the clods, otherwise inter-row hoeing was impossible. From the viewpoint of weed control restricting seedbed preparation to the future sugar beet rows was not of advantage.Precision guidance allowed enlargement of mechanical weed control, i.e. interrow hoeing to 80% (40 em wide at a ·row distance to 50 em). Savings on herbicides were 75%, because little overlap was necessary of chemically and mechanically treated areas. The absence of fertilizers in these inter-row bands did not diminish the number of weeds, and speed of emergence of weeds. The effect of seedbed preparation and drilling the sugar beet crop in complete darkness (at night), made possible by the automatic guidance, on weed infestation was not different from daylight treatments. In these experiments this so called photo-control of weeds was only demonstrable after hoeing.Keywords: weed control, precision guidance, photo control Many agricultural crops are grown in rows with interrow distances that vary between 0.25 and 0. 75 m. Intra-row spacing is often far less, varying from 0.05 to 0.5 m. This means that on both sides of a crop row, there are bands of soil which serve as spacer bands only. Nevertheless, these spacer bands are crumbled, fertilized, sprayed and treated as part of the crop. the rows. Both ways require some form of intelligence and automation, the first to detect the spots where the sugar beet plants are growing, the second to guide the hoe very closely along the sugar beet rows. Bontsema, Grift and Pleyzier (1991) did research on how to distinguish the sugar beet plants from weeds, to make it possible to swing a hoeing knife through the row of sugar beet plants. Laser guidance of the hoeing implement, and prior to that of the sowing machine used in this experiment, make it possible to approach the row of sugar beet plants very closely without risk of damaging them.To lower the dependency of farmers on the use of chemicals, and to decrease the overall use of chemicals by half in the year 2000 (MJP-G, 1992), research has to be done on alternative weed control methods. Band spraying is an opt...
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