John Deere See & Spray

The robot that already changed how American farms spray

John Deere’s See & Spray is the most-deployed agricultural robot we know of, by far. Boom-mounted cameras scan more than 2,500 square feet per second at up to 15 mph. Onboard processors classify each plant as crop or weed and fire individual ExactApply nozzles to spray herbicide only on the weeds. In 2025, customers ran See & Spray across more than 5 million acres in the U.S., saving an estimated 31 million gallons of herbicide mix.

Average customer herbicide savings: 59% in 2024. That number is what’s driving adoption — the per-acre service fee is dwarfed by the chemical and pass-time savings on most operations.

What’s new in 2026

The biggest user-facing change is the licensing math. As of April 1, 2026, John Deere stopped charging the $1/acre fallow fee — fallow acres are now included with the bill. In-crop acres are still billed (currently $5/acre), and high-use operations can elect a new Unlimited Annual License that flattens per-acre planning across the season. Both moves push the per-acre breakeven further in the operator’s favor.

Model year 2027 brings See & Spray Gen 2, which adds variable-rate application — operators can set biomass thresholds and the system varies herbicide rate accordingly, rather than the current binary spray/no-spray decision. The bigger change is crop expansion: from the current four (corn, soybean, cotton, fallow) to nine (adding wheat, barley, canola, peanuts, sugar beets). That roughly doubles the addressable U.S. acreage and opens significant international markets.

Also new in April 2026: See & Scout, a separate product that extracts the field-scouting layer of the same vision stack into a standalone agronomy tool. Where See & Spray decides whether to fire nozzles, See & Scout maps the field’s weed pressure and feeds it into an agronomy report — directly substituting for the human scout walking the field.

Why we care for LostJobs

See & Spray isn’t a humanoid in a factory. It’s a 120-foot sprayer with 36 cameras and machine learning on the boom. The labor it displaces isn’t dramatic but it’s real: the operator who used to walk the field scouting weeds (now substantially supplied by See & Scout), the per-pass spraying operator (fewer passes needed), and at the smaller-farm end, the manual weeding crew that organic and specialty growers still employ.

If your job is in commercial agriculture in the U.S. cornbelt, you’ve probably already worked alongside See & Spray. If you’re a farm laborer in a specialty crop where Gen 2 is about to ship (peanuts, sugar beets), watch the next two model years — the precision-ag economics are closing on you next. If you’re a crop scout selling rounds to growers, See & Scout is the early read on what your day rate is competing against.