John Deere See & Spray: Does AI Spraying Pay for Itself?

In 2024, Wisconsin farmer Tyler Troiola tried John Deere’s See & Spray, which uses cameras and onboard AI to spray weeds rather than whole fields. The proposition is simple: spend on equipment to spend less on chemicals. Whether that investment pays for itself is harder, and his experience shows why the headline percentage is only the start of the answer.

This page follows the public reporting on Tyler’s first season, then works through a hypothetical calculation. The hypothetical uses documented 2025 U.S. usage terms and is not Tyler’s accounts.

The purchase comes before the proof

Tyler farms about 2,800 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat near Eagle, Wisconsin. Precision Farming Dealer reported in May 2024 that he chose See & Spray Premium, which it described as a $25,000 system, as a retrofit for a used 2018 Deere sprayer, after trading in his previous sprayer to get a compatible machine. A new machine with the two-tank Ultimate system was beyond his budget. The reporting does not give his complete transaction cost.

That is where any investment like this starts: money committed before the results arrive. The comparison that matters is against the alternative the farmer would actually choose, whether that is keeping an old sprayer, buying another used one or replacing equipment that needed replacing anyway.

How targeted spraying changes the economics

A conventional broadcast application treats the whole width of the boom. See & Spray uses cameras and onboard AI to identify weeds and switch individual nozzles as the machine moves, so chemical that would have covered bare ground stays in the tank. Premium uses one tank and can either broadcast or target spray. Ultimate has two tanks, so it can do both in the same pass.

Less spraying only helps if the field still gets what it needs. Some herbicides work by stopping weeds from emerging later, so a farmer still needs a program for that job.

One farmer, different field results

Tyler’s July 2024 follow-up showed both the attraction and the complication. On 10-inch corn, the system sprayed about 13 to 18 percent of the field, which he said meant more than 80 percent herbicide savings. On 18-inch corn, savings fell to about 65 percent. In some soybean fields, they were only about 15 percent.

He suspected heavy residue made weeds harder to tell from soybeans, and he had chosen a setting that sprays when the cameras are unsure, trading savings for caution. These are selected results he reported, not an audited profit statement. Still, the contrast matters: one purchase can face very different conditions on the same farm.

Deere’s usage-fee strategy

Tyler’s first season ran under earlier pricing; he mentioned paying a $4 per acre subscription fee. For 2025, Deere introduced what it calls the Application Savings Guarantee. A Deere dealer panel explained that farmers pay $5 for each in-crop acre the system leaves unsprayed while it is turned on, and Deere lists $1 per fallow acre. Deere’s own fine print says “savings” here means reduced application volume, not other costs. For 2026, it added an unlimited annual license for heavy users.

Cover 100 acres and leave 60 unsprayed, and the fee applies to 60 acres: $300. The farmer keeps the chemical that would have gone on that area, and Deere collects a payment tied to it. For Deere, usage creates revenue beyond the hardware sale. For the farmer, it is another cost to subtract.

A hypothetical payback calculation

Take a hypothetical farm, not Tyler’s. Assume one targeted pass over 2,000 acres a year, a targetable herbicide mix costing $20 an acre, and 60 percent of the area left unsprayed. That avoids $24,000 of chemical. The usage fee takes $6,000, leaving $18,000 a year before other costs. At that rate, a $25,000 upgrade would recover its price in about 1.4 years.

The University of Arkansas Extension puts a Premium retrofit at $25,000 to $100,000, depending on the existing sprayer. At $100,000, the same example takes about 5.6 years. Neither figure includes financing, installation, machine costs or changes in labor, and both assume the savings repeat every year. If the targetable mix cost $5 an acre, the $5 fee would absorb the entire chemical saving, leaving nothing to recover the upgrade.

What changes the answer

Cheaper chemicals make each avoided spray worth less. Heavier weed pressure leaves less spraying to avoid. Fewer applications spread the investment more thinly. A 2026 peer-reviewed study in Agrosystems, Geosciences & Environment estimated that, on average, a single application had to involve more than $27 of herbicide per hectare, about $11 an acre, before Premium beat a broadcast sprayer. Its model assumed about 10,000 acres of applications a year, which can include repeated passes over the same land, so its results should not be lifted into a smaller operation unchanged. The authors thank Deere and Blue River for supporting the research and providing the commercial data.

What the farmer actually keeps

The public reporting shows strong savings in some conditions and weaker results in others. It does not give the complete costs and annual net savings needed to establish Tyler’s payback, so I cannot say his investment paid for itself.

Charging for usage is the same shift I described in Google’s pay-per-redemption ads: the vendor gets paid when the outcome happens. That aligns incentives, and it also means the buyer has to keep asking what value comes back after the fee. The most important number is what the farmer keeps after the bills are paid.

What would convince you that an AI upgrade is worth paying for: the demonstration, the savings percentage or the results after every cost?