Ullmanna Newman saves up to 90% on labour costs
The hoeing elements of the Newman intra-row hoeing machine from the Czech manufacturer Ullmanna move back and forth at high speed, up to 3 times per second. Importer Agri Bio-Solutions has been demonstrating this hoeing machine in the Netherlands for the past 2 months.
The Newman hoe removes weeds with great precision within the row and combines AI with a straightforward mechanical technique. The machine hoes around the crop and works with cameras that detect the crop itself rather than the weeds using AI. “That makes the algorithms much simpler compared to recognising a wide range of weed species,” says Martin Heerema, owner of the Groningen-based company Agri Bio-Solutions.
The AI system learns to recognise new crops within a day. This means the Newman hoe is now operational in many crops: sugar beet, open-field vegetables, pumpkins, maize, onions, rice, and garlic. Various types of hoe are available, and growers can fit additional elements to the machine that also hoe between the rows. This allows them to hoe the entire field in a single pass. A smartphone app allows various machine settings to be adjusted. Examples are the depth and distance to the plants per hoeing element, as well as the width and height of the area scanned by the camera.
90 % labour cost savings
“Since we started demonstrating the Ullmanna Newman in the Netherlands, there has been considerable interest among farmers,” says Heerema. “We receive calls from farmers every week. Automating intra-row hoeing is especially interesting for organic farmers, as it replaces a lot of manual labour. It is very difficult to find people for manual weeding, and it is becoming increasingly expensive. The Newman hoe also offers a solution for conventional vegetable growers facing labour shortages.”
According to manufacturer Ullmanna, a single element of the Newman replaces the capacity of approximately 10 people. A hoe with a standard working width of 3 metres and 6 elements for a crop with a row spacing of 50 centimetres, such as sugar beet, therefore replaces 60 people. This allows the investment to pay off quickly through a 90% reduction in labour costs.
Each element with its own camera
Each element of the Newman hoe has 4 lamps, its own camera, a parallelogram, a weeding element, a plug, and a compressed air connection. This enables the hoeing elements to move pneumatically. The lamps ensure proper lighting so that the crop is clearly different from the weeds. The elements are mounted on a box-section frame and can slide to accommodate different crops. The number of elements depends on the crop row spacing. The height (and therefore the hoeing depth) is also controlled constantly and independently per element. The machine is equipped with sideshift control, meaning that GPS guidance is not strictly necessary, but Isobus control is required. The minimum sowing distance of the crop within the row is 8 cm. With the Newman hoe, growers can drive at speeds of up to 5 kilometres per hour, This results in a very high hoeing capacity.
