Sprayers101 Archive
Search our archive of expert-written, data-driven analysis of spraying techniques, equipment, strategies, and more.
Simple Statistics for Growers
In North America, winter is agriculture conference and lecture season. Growers are inundated with graphs and charts and left to make sense of what…
Putting a Number on Pesticide Waste
Waste (noun): an act or instance of using or expending something to no purpose. In agriculture, environment and economy are intertwined. Producers strive to…
Homemade Air-Assist Tower Retrofit
It was Saturday morning in April, 2016 when I received an email from Steven Bierlink, an orchardist in Washington State. He was curious about…
Selecting a Sprayer Pump
When I had to replace a pump on a small scale sprayer, I had a lot of questions about how they worked, their capacities,…
Pressure Spikes and Relief Valves on Air-Assist Sprayers
A properly-sized pump should produce more flow than is needed and work in conjunction with the atomizers to regulate that flow. Typical to high…
Pumps for Applying Crop Protection Products
The pump is the heart of the sprayer and a key component for producing the flow of spray material and sprayer output. Because various…
Sprayer Wheel Maintenance
This article was co-written with Murray Thiessen, Consulting Agricultural Mechanic. Sprayer wheel assemblies should be cleaned and inspected as part of regular annual maintenance. Wheel bearing…
Airblast Nozzles – On or Off?
Spray that is not directed at the target is wasted spray. Many pesticide labels specifically require the operator to restrict spray to the target…
The Droplet Size Debate
Funny how some issues never go away. For as long as I’ve been in the sprayer business, the question of ideal droplet size for…
Micron Woman – Guide to the World of Spray Droplets
You just finished a great spray day. Everything felt right! Your timing and product choice were bang-on, the weather was good, and your sprayer was…
Developing Criteria for the Ideal Agricultural Spray – a Biologist’s Perspective
Originally published in: Wolf, T.M. and Downer, R.A. ILASS Americas, 11th Annual Conference on Liquid Atomization and Spray Systems, Sacramento, CA, May, 1998 Note…
For Sale: Gently Used 1950s Boom Sprayer
This article isn’t about best practices, or social contracts, or innovative new technologies. It’s just a fascinating bit of history. If it has any…
The Most Important Developments in Spraying
Some things have improved a lot. Others have lost ground. Some years ago, a few of us weed scientists sat around a table and…
We Need Better Drift Control Technologies
Sprayer manufacturers have all but offloaded the entire responsibility for drift management to the sprayer nozzle. It’s asking too much. Sprayers have changed a…
Perspective on Rates, Volumes and Coverage
This short article is a thought exercise designed to give some perspective on chemical rates, carrier volumes and the foliar area we expect them…
What’s the Relationship Between Vapour Drift and Inversions?
Drift symptoms can take a few weeks to be discovered, and to figure out the cause, people need to reconstruct the conditions during the…
Ground vs Aerial Application of Fungicide in Chickpeas
This article was originally published in the Proceedings of the Soils and Crops Workshop, 2005. Authors Tom Wolf (AAFC), Brian Caldwell (AAFC), Cheryl Cho…
Ragweed Control
When a grower asks two specialists the same question, they can receive skewed (or even contradictory) answers. In this case, however, we were all…
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…
What Nozzle is This? (Field Sprayers)
Us this handy visual guide to identify a mystery nozzle you may find on a field sprayer. We’ve included the most common low-drift nozzles…
Categorizing air-assist sprayers by air-handling design
Air handling systems Air handling systems can be specialists or generalists; some are designed to do one thing very well while others are more…
Nozzle Selection for Boom Sprayers
Picking the correct nozzle for a spray job can be a daunting task. There is a lot of product selection, and a lot of…
Pesticide Safety for Student Workers
This article is based on a presentation by Dr. Melanie Filotas, who delivered it as part of the 2019 agriculture summer student orientation day. Most…
Rate Controllers on Air-Assist Sprayers
There are many advantages to using rate controllers, but their primary role is to maintain a constant application rate. All sprayers change speed on…
Tipping Sprayers and Spills
This short article is a reminder for sprayer operators to respect the possibility of tipping a sprayer. Every spring I catch wind of someone…