Row Spraying
The pressure on the amount of crop protection products used is increasing. Many research is investigating if biopesticides can replace the use of chemical pesticides but unfortunately that is not yet the case. Another way to approach the problem is to spray only where it’s needed to reduce the amount of products used.
Contact herbicides will only be effective if there are weeds. When there are insects or fungus on the plant you only need to spray the plant and not the soil. This is all very logical but still, we spray most of the pesticides at the full field. Even though many research has shown that row spraying can reduce 50 to 90% of the pesticides used. A huge reduction in costs and a huge gain for the environment.
To test more of the possibilities of row spraying, we bought a small sprayer that can spray 3m wide with a row distance of 70 or 75cm. An extension to 9m is also possible. We bought the sprayer to mount in our AgroIntelli Robotti to do some autonomous row spraying. This might cover the capacity problem of the smaller row sprayers.
We will use the row sprayer more and more not only to reduce the input of crop protection products but also to see if we can tackle the capacity problem on one or another way. We also have the ambition to test modern sprayers that can switch the nozzles into row spraying.
Contact
Jan Vanwijnsberghe
Researcher crop protection