The acquisition of Bilberry helps Trimble complete its application lineup, which includes guidance and rate control systems
Trimble has added to its suite of spray technologies by acquiring Bilberry, a company that builds a selective spraying system capable of green-on-green applications.
Green-on-green systems identify and treat individual weeds within a crop canopy.
“Bilberry is the first company that has a commercially available product. It’s already available in Australia,” said Guillermo Perez-Iturbe, senior marketing director at Trimble. “They have a selective spraying system that actually works.”
He said Bilberry will help complete Trimble’s application solutions, which include guidance and rate control systems and a product called WeedSeeker.
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The latter identifies and treats weeds in a preplant or fallow scenario, otherwise known as a green-on-brown application.
Bilberry is more capable than WeedSeeker, said Perez-Iturbe, and Trimble will continue to support and develop these systems.
“WeedSeeker is a product that’s very strong in the green over brown. It’s very well received in that application, and very successful and bringing all the benefits to those customers, so WeedSeeker will still be there and will be there for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Bilberry is based in Gentilly, France, and its representatives said it can achieve a 90 percent kill rate of broadleaf weeds in cereal crops. Its artificial intelligence-based algorithms are being improved to identify more weeds in many crops, including canola, they added.
The company started as a project at a French engineering school in 2014 by Guillaume Jourdain, Hugo Serrat and Jules Beguerie.
The Bilberry system’s hardware includes a camera at every three metres on a sprayer boom, and each camera has a processor that sends information to a central computer in the sprayer’s cab. The computer then sends signals to the nozzles and controls when they open or close.
Training machine learning algorithms is a long and tedious process. Images must be shown to the algorithm thousands of times so it can learn the weeds and the crop.
Many companies can throw together a camera, processors and nozzle control system, but the utility of these systems is determined by how fast the algorithms can identify in-crop weeds.
Sprayers equipped with the Bilberry system typically travel around 20 km-h when performing a green-on-green application. Bilberry also creates weed-density maps so farmers can track problem areas.
The company has worked with multiple spraying manufacturers, including Agrifac, and has experimented with its system in Western Canada. More research and training of Bilberry’s artificial intelligence on weed in Canadian crops will be required before the system will be useful here.
Perez-Iturbe said the Bilberry team is a good fit with Trimble because the two share similar values and goals.
“We’re creating an ecosystem or environment where we can take the most advantage of available resources, and I’m talking about land, seed, herbicides, and to create that in a fashion that is sustainable in the production cycle,” he said.
He referred to case studies that show Bilberry can reduce herbicide use by more than 80 percent, significantly lowering input costs for farmers.
Trimble Ag has offered precision technology for more than 20 years and has distribution partners around the world.
“Trimble is a technology company that has been around for more than 40 years. So, there’s a lot of technology stack and a lot of the main knowledge within the walls of Trimble that creates synergies,” Perez-Iturbe said.
“We acquired, in the last 20 years, more than 100 companies, and we’ve been integrating them and improving and developing new technology to different industry customers to actually have the benefits of connecting all of the workflows.”
The Bilberry business will be reported as part of Trimble’s Resources and Utilities segment.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
