Increasing pest and disease pressures urge specialty crop farmers to spray orchards more frequently than ever before to grow marketable products. In the order from primitive to sophisticated, current technologies in industry allow orchard farmers to spray trees in three different ways: conventional air-blast sprayers which are the most common, sensor controlled sprayers that activate nozzles (on/off) by plant presence and canopy adapting sprayers that adjust the sprayer outputs in each nozzle by canopy density.

Despite their common usage, air-blast sprayers are known as being inefficient due to wastage of chemicals by spraying off-target areas such as gaps between trees and loses to the ground. Expenditures on agricultural chemicals and environmental degradation have been serious issues with traditional methods for orchard farmers and nursery owners.

SprayWell is an agricultural automation product used in spraying applications of specialty crops such as citrus trees, nuts and ornamentals. It retrofits to conventional air-blast sprayers and automatically actuates nozzles on/off by detecting crop architecture in millimeter resolution via emitting and receiving light beams with LiDAR technology. It sprays only to the tree canopy and avoids non-target areas such as gaps between the trees, thus not only reduces the chemical costs for farmers but also provides an environmentally friendly solution for spraying applications by decreasing water, chemical, and fuel usage. With an average of 25% savings in chemicals usage, SprayWell provides an economically viable solution for specialty crop farmers.

Integrated lower-cost LiDAR module, high speed and precise measurements, and user friendly interface make SprayWell an advanced level crop sensing system for orchard farmers and nursery owners with 10-33% savings in pesticide volume and 15-25% savings in labor cost.

The minimum viable product (MVP) SprayWell was designed and manufactured by an individual who is starting a company specialized in agricultural technology to design and manufacture innovative products and services to help farmers make better decisions and increase efficiency.

There are 8M acres of specialty tree crop in the US with 150k farmers, which is a total market of $250M. More than %50 of the market consists of citrus and tree nut farms, which is the primary market for SprayWell. Assuming a 2-years of pay-back time, SprayWell is a profitable investment for any tree farms bigger than 25 acres. Being introduced to the farmers internationally through field demonstrations, SprayWell has a significant potential to be sold as an OEM product as well as online sales.