Pesticide redistribution: an important aspect of synthetic pesticides

What is Redistribution? If you’re a sprayer operator with some experience behind you, you may have applied mercury arsenate, nicotine, Paris green, or perhaps even DDT. All of these historical pesticides were effective, but they were also toxic to both the applicators and the environment. Fortunately, today’s agrochemical manufacturers produce pesticides that are effective while […]

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Spray Patterns for Spot Sprays

Spot spraying promises to dramatically cut herbicide use. Data from Green-on-Brown (GoB) sprays suggest at least 50% and possibly 90% savings are possible, depending on weed density and the system employed. These savings are significant. But system performance depends on the nozzle selection even more than for broadcast sprays. What are the issues? Pattern Width […]

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Broadcast Boom Nozzle Spacing

North American built boom sprayers have nozzle spacings of 20” (50 cm in the rest of the world), but other spacings such as 15” (37 cm) and 10” (25 cm) also exist. What are the reasons for these alternative spacings and do they offer any inherent advantages? Why spacing matters Nozzles are spaced along a […]

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Rate Controllers and a Pulse Width Modulation Update

There’s been a lot of talk about rate control in spraying, and one key technology is pulse-width modulated spray systems (PWM). Although PWM has been commercially available for a number of years, we are seeing new products enter the market. This article explains what PWM is and how to make it work in a spray […]

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Assessing water sensitive paper – Part 3

This is the final part of our three-part article discussing methods for digitizing and processing water sensitive paper. You can read part one here and part two here. Morphological operations We can now move on to the larger shapes, or “morphology” of the objects in our binary image. Our goal is to quantify deposits by […]

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