Sprayers are high tech machines applying expensive crop protection and fertilizer products through precise nozzles.
But how much do you know about how well the sprays reach the leaves of the plants?
There’s a new technological answer that’s more precise than paper strips on leaves.
Metos Dropsight uses a liquid tracer dye, a lightbox and an app to give farmers a better understanding of how well their sprayers and nozzles are working.
The process to use Dropsight is simple, says Jonathan Zettler of Fieldwalker Agronomy, a distributor of the product. Here are the steps:
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- Triple rinse the sprayer.
- Add the water-soluble tracer with water to the spray tank. Concentration depends on what you’re trying to test.
- Run the sprayer about 100 feet
- Pick leaves
- Put them in the leaf lab box
- Use the app on a phone to take images through a hole in the leaf lab box
- Get the report from the app on droplet size and how much coverage was achieved.
The light box runs on a 12 volt plug, so can be powered in most pickup trucks, which means the system can be used in the field.
Once the deposition is measured, changes can be made and tested.
“You can make management adjustments on the sprayer to get it through the full canopy of the crop, or wherever it needs to go,” says Zettler.
Changes can range from adjusting droplet size, to increasing pressure to get more plant contact.
“It can provide some indications whether you’re getting good value for your crop protection product when you’re applying it, or fertilizer, if you’re doing foliar fertilizer,” he says.
Zettler says the system costs about $800 and is targeted at farmers with their own application equipment or custom operators.
“You don’t need to take it anywhere and you have fairly quick results in terms of knowing where you are at,” he says.
