Articles helping with field sprayer nozzle selection
This is the second of a series of short, educational and irreverent videos made with Real Agriculture to bring a little levity to sprayer education. Let’s face it – ironically, nozzles can be pretty dry.
Here we enjoy an early morning soy bean scout and a light breakfast of toast as we demonstrate how pressure, droplet size and canopy penetration interact.
The questions surrounding these aspects of spraying come up very often.
Tom Wolf recaps some key aspects of water volume and water quality you may not have considered, plus we get that answer on when a stainless steel tank might be the right choice.
Moving on to nozzles and overall spray operation tweaks, Wolf summarizes the reasons for moving to double (or twin-fan) nozzles in some scenarios, plus offers some insight into where your time may be best spent on improving your fill transfer set up.
One of the greatest threats to lost return and non-target plant damage in spraying is drift. Spray applicators have to be conscious of all kinds of factors that affect the risk of drift, including wind speed, boom height, potential inversions and, of course, spray quality.
Tom Wolf zeroes in on spray quality, explaining what it means and how a given nozzle is categorized. Wolf also suggests which categories of quality (from Very Fine to Ultra Coarse) should rarely be considered in agricultural applications, and where spray applicators can find information to aid in one aspect of the crucial decision making process surrounding spraying.
What’s the right choice for nozzle fan angle? 80 degrees or 110 degrees? This question leads us to boom height. How do we select the right boom height?
Nozzle fan angle does play a role, but so does the type of sprayer you run and, more importantly, the height that creates the best overlap pattern. In this Spray Tips, Tom Wolf explains the drift risks and realities of boom height settings on high clearance sprayers, why high-set booms can negate the benefits of certain nozzle designs and why low-drift nozzles need 100% overlap. Then, it’s off to the white board to illustrate the relationship between nozzle spacing and ideal boom height.
Good spray quality is essential in application, but all of the factors involved can make getting there quite a challenge. In reviewing magazines, you may see that publishers will bold a certain pressure (like 40 psi). They do this not because that is the pressure the nozzle must experience, but because that is the pressure at which the nozzle produces its nominal flow rate.
So if you don’t have to spray at that bolded/highlighted number, how do you decide on your ideal pressure?
Tom Wolf talks about the evolution of pressure ranges in nozzles and walks us through an applicator’s decision-making process. After following the tips in the video, calibrating your sprayer and driving out to the field, you should be able to maximize spray quality by simply using your pressure gauge as the speedometer.