Don’t try this tempting shortcut

There’s a call that I’ve been getting for 20 years now. It came again this week. Someone has a twincap with two small air-induced tips, and they’re applying herbicides and fungicides with low water volumes, often 5 gpa, sometimes less. They call because they want to know how much wind they can spray in. Is […]

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Thermal Inversions for Sprayer Operators

The Earth’s Atmosphere. The illustration of the Earth is to scale, but the landscape is not. Our focus in on the Surface Boundary Layer.

In April 2014, NDSU extension published an excellent factsheet explaining what thermal inversions are, how to detect them and how they affect pesticide spray drift. That factsheet inspired this article. The Atmosphere The Earth is surrounded by a layer of air called the atmosphere. Think of it as a sheet of liquid percolating and flowing […]

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Exploding Sprayer Myths (ep.12): The Buffer Zone

In this episode of Exploding Sprayer Myths we reduce a complicated best practice to black and white… literally. Watch as Jason and Tom get a creepy lesson in the do’s and do not’s of no-spray areas. Under the watchful eye of Dr. Jim Todd (OMAFRA Industrial Crops Specialist and Rod Serling cos-player), brace yourself as […]

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Exploding Sprayer Myths (ep.11): Drift

This video won the Gold 2019 Canadian Farm Writers Federation’s Jack McPherson Award for Electronic Media. This award is for the best video, news story or feature broadcast by a Canadian medium less than 15 minutes in length on an agricultural topic. We’d like to thank Jason Strove, Bern Tobin and the whole team at […]

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Pesticide Drift and Communication

Staged photo of a Yasi spraying water. Source unknown.

When it comes to information about mitigating pesticide drift, it’s plentiful and easily accessed. I have an archive of >30 articles written by Ontario Ministry of Agriculture staff spanning 1999 to present day. Many are on this website. In fact, there’s so much good information out there it feels like there’s nothing left to say. […]

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