For as long as farming has been practiced, farmers have realized that yield, soil characteristics, and pest infestations vary across fields. Until recently, farmers have dealt with this variation by manually adjusting fertilizer applications according to fertility test results, and have spot sprayed pesticides to control localized pest populations. The technology to increase the ease and precision of such applications has increased tremendously in the past five years. Much of this progress can be attributed to increased computing capacity and speed. Several developments have occurred that will significantly impact the way in which weeds are controlled in the near future, and some of these technologies are already being used in the northern plains states. These new technologies can be broken in two groups, "real-time" weed detection, and what I'll call historic or geographic information systems (GIS) data management of agricultural field information. The "real-time" sensors detect weeds and activate the sprayer based on a threshold criteria, or simply activate the sprayer every time a weed is detected. The GIS approach activates the liquid or dry bulk application based on soil physical and chemical properties, or on weed seedbank numbers.