Navigating New Technologies for Drift and Weed Control

thank you appreciate it set this down all right can everybody hear me okay I like to yell I don't like to use a microphone all right solid uh so thank you for the introduction Josh so uh just real quick again my name is Tommy buts grew up in Wisconsin I will warn you in advance I have a very strange accent now all right so I grew up here in Wisconsin so I still have some of the Wisconsin all right I was in western Nebraska for three and a half years though so I've got a little bit of cowboy culture from that and then the past five and a half years I was actually in Arkansas as a faculty member down there so you'll probably catch a y'all today you'll probably catch a fix and two at some point all right so just be aware if you don't understand something I get it just ask all right and I'll try and rephrase it all right so please feel free uh also throughout today whatever we're talking about please feel free to ask questions at any time throw stuff at me I'm good with any of that all right I'd rather talk about what y'all want to talk about than just me spewing random slides and stuff okay so feel free to ask anytime uh and then the last thing right before I get started I want to ask yall a question just so I have a good idea what is everybody's primary position that you all are doing how many farmers do we have here okay how many uh like agronomist sales folks okay the bulk do we have any uh like crop Consultants okay a few there too so a good mix of Consultants anonomous and then a handful of farmers all right a lot of what I'm going to talk about today will apply across the board it may not sound like it and if you have questions about that we can chat about it but I'm going to talk in this presentation in particular a lot about nozzles and setting up sprayers correctly and making sure that we're using some of the basic technology in the right way to get the most out of of our wheat control tactics now as an agronomist right A lot of times or a consultant I'll get looked at and be like well I don't handle the sprayer I don't do anything there I pass my wreck along and that's the end of it no okay that's conversation that I want to bring out today is opening lines of communication even as a consultant or an agronomist this stuff is an important thing to know and if you can start having conversations with the applicators and then just so you know a conversation is a two-way street all right we're not telling the applicators exactly what to do but we can have a two-way street conversation about some different things okay that everything can do a whole lot better down the road all right everybody clear on that can I get off my Soap Box all right Perfect all right so let's get started down arrow right okay so first and foremost the thing you need to know about me I'm a huge football fan okay so I try and tie everything back to Sports in some form or fashion so I'll have a handful of different sports related things today but this is one of the best ways that I can demonstrate what we're going to talk about today and why it's important now I apologize in advance it is an Arkansas football reference I will have some Wisconsin at least one Wisconsin football reference later today though all right right but this is the best way that I can possibly explain why the stuff we're going to talk about is important all right so we've got our pests that we're trying to tackle if we do a whole bunch of things wrong low spray volumes poor coverage wrong nozzles and droplet size application setup errors those pests just keep on a chugging and running and get to that end zone and then when they do that especially in Weeds they reproducing you know have more seeds you're dealing with them down the road even worse right so that's can't describe it any better than that video right there that's that's what happens when we throw all these wrong things at it those pests just keep on trucking right through it all right also I would like to mention the week after o Grady did this play Arkansas football cut him yes good job Arkansas all right moving on so the first thing I want to hit on now my title was technology right so a lot of people think we're going to start talking right off the gates about all the fancy new things the drones and the SE sprays and the the one smart sprays and all of that let me tell you there's a whole lot of technology that we need to get right first before we ever get to that and that's what I want to talk about on the front end so the First Technology thing I want to talk about is spray options and that happens to be spray volume and droplet size or nozzle selection okay we're going to take a step back and talk about some of that first so the first thing I want to ask y'all is uh Liberty herbicide is it a contact or a systemic i f contact right no trick questions today that's a lie I will have trick questions okay do you think spray volume matters for Liberty herb side okay yes lower higher better higher is better I would agree the picture helped show that too right five versus 20 GPA now that 20 GPA don't look excellent though does it right there's still problems there but a higher spray volume is helping us out let's go to daa is that a contact or a systemic herbicide systemic it's exactly right it moves through the plants kill it right does spray volume matter for that not as much I heard kind of mixed results yeses in nose and H and ha and about right there the answer is yes it does matter 20 GPA does better than 5 GPA still right more volume gets us more droplets which gets us more opportunities to try and kill those Wheats okay now I will say 20 GPA still doesn't look excellent here right what's missing from this conversation on when I just throw these pictures up a stray volume what nozzle right droplet size I'm GNA tell you right now if anybody tells you this is the ultimate spray volume that you need to be using every time you can walk out of that talk I give you permission all right there should always be hand in hand talking about the nozzle or droplet size with the spray volume those two two things go hand in hand together okay so if we talk about droplet size instead let's talk about Liberty again that contact herbicide is droplet size matter for that 100% so we've got a whole range of droplet sizes up here from 150 microns which is a fine spray all the way up to 900 which is an ultra course and you can see drastic changes in in droplet size treatments right and I would like to emphasize this one right here 300 Micron droplet size at 5 gallons per acre looks good now please don't walk away and say that Purdue extensions recommendation is a spray Liberty at 5 GPA okay that is not what I'm saying okay but what I am saying is if you can select the right nozzle get the right droplet size out there you can do some really good work and then if you also P pair this with a little bit higher spray volume you are mitigating a whole lot of risk to maximize that application right so I want to emphasize that okay next got to talk about the Dand front the systemic herbicide right just drop size matter for that I see some yeses are you sure it's systemic we're spraying it with massive droplet sizes right shouldn't matter does it matter guys are smart today all right it does matter right now it doesn't matter as much that got brought up with spray volume right so it doesn't matter quite as much you can see from 300 microns to 750 really there's no major difference so then why not spray it at 750 because our weed control didn't get affected and we can reduce drift potential right which we'll talk about in a second but so that's good what I do like to highlight on this one though you look at this 900 Micron treatment right here how does that look for weed control yeah I can actually tell you this was a study we did in Nebraska that site year in Nebraska that 9 100 Micron treatment was not statistically different from our non-treated control so what that means is we could have sprayed absolutely nothing and done just as well as a labeled rate of damba at that size of a droplet that's crazy to think about right now this 900 Micron size too it is it is a little large for what we typically use in our egg applications but it's not unheard of okay we can get there with some big large drop of producing nozzles I'll pick on tjet right the TTI can get us there especially if you pair it all of a sudden with a drift reducing adant we can get over that size and so we can start running into issues because we're we're Teeter tottering on this upper limit okay but I will say this was again talk about the two together this was at only 5 GPA so if we're spraying with these large droplet producing nozzles especially in things like the damber and the list systems where we have to reduce drift we're we're you know relegated to certain nozzles spray volume becomes even more important there because we're limited on what size droplets we can choose right go ahead you air KS B so that's a good question so there's a whole gamut with droplet sizes with different nozzles there's even some uh non-air induction tips but they can still get you up to that 900 Micron size so like if you've heard of wilger they used a on the puls and sprayers they can get you up there with certain ones too but like just some common ones I always like to use tjet because typically those are fairly common uh an XR flat fan is generally somewhere in that 150 to 300 zone right like the fine to medium the aixr is always my middle of the rad nozzle that's somewhere between the 300 to 600 depending on size and pressure and thing and then the TTI gets you up here in this like 750 800 type range and the aisr and the TTI would both be air induction tips then yeah yeah uh no so this was using a uh pulse width modulation sprayer and so we had done some work in the lab with pressure and nozzle combinations to get these specific droplet sizes so pressures varied a little bit the the rate is obviously all the same so it was all 5 GPA the rate of chemical is all the same it's just basically we had to manipulate pressure to get the sizes yeah any other questions all right is everybody clear on that front Okay real quick I just also wanted to highlight why we're talking about kind of the coverage and the balance between those nozzles it's kind of a good segue to talk about uh the air induction tips and that kind of thing I've got three different coverage cards here that I always like to show okay can anybody tell me what three spray volumes I used on these three different cards everybody see that so I got this one right here the one in the middle and the one on the left side what spray volumes are each of those at all the same would I really do that to you is that what everybody's going to go with they're all the same I'm going to pack it up and leave Rodrigo what am I doing here oh anyway they are all the same they are now the real question is what are they they are all the same but what are they wait what 20 GPA anybody else got a guess 15 15 GPA anybody else 12 GPA wrong wrong and wrong we're at 10 GPA right here this is 10 GPA so this is an XR flat fan nozzle so fine dropel size medium drole size I should say right this one is the aixr nozzle okay so we're talking like a coar spray generally but 10 GPA this is that TTI an ultra course spray 10 GPA the coverages on these things go from I got to remember now what it is I want to say it's I think it's like 20 30 40% if I remember right so the TTI was like 20% this was uh 30% this was 40% pretty sure that's what it was okay I do like to always show this though because this will get into some of the technology later and I know we've got a drone operator here and we're operating at some low volumes with the drones and things and airplanes and helicopters and stuff here we've got oh whoops wait a minute ha I lied to you this was the 10 GPA one I tricked you this one right here is actually 5 GPA out of that XR flat fan and we were guessing 15 and 20 out of it or 12 I guess somebody said 12 right so again this balance between volume and droplet size if you pick the right droplet size you can still get some really good coverage and actually this one the 5 GPA treatment with this XR was equivalent to 10 GPA out of this TTI nozzle so you can balance it out a little a little bit with droplet size and volume again right so when we start talking about spray drones later and I get into some of this coverage and weed control stuff this is partially at play with some of the droplets that are coming out of those things okay even at little volumes we can still kind of get there so that's a good question um so so I should repeat the question was any any kind of coverage cards or data with surfactant and stuff with with that part of it so generally speaking the coverage part of surfactant doesn't necessarily change it spreads it out more which helps get more absorption because it's helping droplets kind of stay on a leaf surface spread it out it allows more surface area for it to be absorbed so like the coverage part doesn't necessarily change you're still kind of getting the same number of droplets there I guess is what I'm kind of getting at what does change it would change our coverage number but in reality it's not changing what what we're concerned with from a coverage standpoint what it's changing is the fact is that you're spreading it out it it can absorb more and it's retained more but like it would kind it would be a biased result in my opinion on what like the coverage number actually says what I will tell you about surfactants though too what surfactants are doing that they can improve coverage is not necessarily that spreading Factor generally speaking surfactants always lower your droplet size and so when you end up with a smaller droplet size you end up with more droplets and a fixed volume for more coverage so surfactant will in fact get you more coverage but it's more because it changes in the droplet size and that spreading effect the spreading effect helps droplets just stay on and kind of spread out to help get absorbed but it's not really changing the coverage part does that make sense okay right so like coverage in theory is basically just based on your drop number of droplets and you know how it's impacting and retained and stuff like that and so like with a surfactant it's not necessarily changing what's getting there but it'll change the spread Factor part of it and that would bias a coverage estimate but if it's not really changing how much you have there you still have the same dep deposition there it's just changed where it lays yeah all right any other questions all right I already lost my clicker now okay here we go so moving on from that conversation now you got to talk about the spray drift component right because basically if you listen to any of that the recommendation should be let's use an XR nozzle fog it out there right at a high spray volume no Purdue is not saying that okay so now we got to talk about the spray drift balancing act so uh I always like to say there's four main things that affect particle drift who knows what those four things are what's the number one thing that affects spray drift oh we got some other things now we got some dissension amongst the ranks it's going to be a mutiny what's the number one thing drop now now we're saying multiple things we're hedging bets oh my goodness here's where I make my money back this here we go no no okay anybody have a consensus what the number one thing was should have stuck with your guns it's winds speed and wind direction wind speed drastically affects our drift more than any other factor that we have out there uh there was some data that showed when wind speed doubled from like 5 to 10 miles an hour I think and 10 miles an hour still gets pray day right when wind speed doubled from 5 10 miles hour downwind spray drift increased by like 700% it's a ton wind speed's a huge deal right what's second factor that affects drift the second biggest Factor yes what's that no still coming it's not second biggest Factor still pressure affects droplet size boom hide hey there we go who was that yeah gold star for you today boom High is correct that is the next one when boom height doubled from 18 to 36 in when guys are spraying at 36 Ines it's a safe place guys we can be honest with each other all right when it doubled from 18 to 36 inches downwind drift uh increased by 350% how many people have watched those spray rigs going through like an eagle in the fields Wings just keep getting up there right seen it there there's a sprayer in Arkansas that was going by on the road and I could have stepped out and walked underneath the boom and still had to like jump NBA Style to try and hit the boom okay so that's the next problem the next one I'll give you is distance to susceptible vegetation buffer zones right so that doesn't really change Drift But it changes what gets affected by drift right if you have a buffer zone you don't have the spray hitting those susceptible species you can reduce your your of Target impact okay and then we get to number four so the fourth out of the big four is now droplet size but droplet size always likes to get brought up first right why does it get brought up first it's the only one we can really control right that's exactly right we can't affect windspeed windspeed is going to blow what it is we got hundreds and thousands of acres to get across we're going to be rolling even if it's blowing 20 miles an hour don't tell don't call Rodrigo and I and tell us that but we know it's going to happen okay so we got to deal with that boom height flight height uh that is relatively fixed okay so if you look in the tjack catalog it will tell you a recommended boom height for your specific nozzles and your nozzle spacing to get the correct coverage so technically speaking we really can't affect that other than slowing down and making sure our boom Height's not 10 feet in the air we get it down to where it's supposed to be right and then the buffer zone part well that's either label mandated or you know we don't know what is around us for susceptible vegetation that kind of thing so droplet size is the one thing we can actually manage so just a little bit of background info we talked about using a bigger droplet size to help reduce drift you can see here this is a little bit of data from North Dakota where they just kind of theoretically calculated um I mentioned basically from 100 microns to a th000 microns is about where we're at for agricultural applications so if you have a fine spray with 100 Micron size it'll take 10 seconds for that droplet to land to the Target and in that 10 seconds in a 3 mph wind that droplet can travel 50 ft off Target 3 mph wind which none of us are ever spraying in US included on the research side okay now if you jump that droplet size up to a thousand Micron so we're getting you know even past that TTI range a little bit that takes less than one second to fall 10 feet and it can move off Target less than 5 feet in that 3 mph wind so bigger droplet sizes help reduce drift so we're playing this Balancing Act of good coverage reducing drift you know trying to implement a higher spray volume to make up for some of this this is the world that we're living in okay now I did want to mention real quick because like I said a lot of you are a grous Consultants you know want to talk to your applicators about trying to reduce drift potential so I've got this little uh what I want to say example of how we can reduce drift all right or drift potential I should say so up here you'll notice a droplet spectrum uh from an XR 11025 nozzle at 60 PSI using water right here this black bar indicates our driftable fines or our high drift potential and it's about 26% of that application is considered highly driftable that's a lot let me tell you that's a lot of that spray that's potentially moving off Target if you look at that application what would y'all recommend to do to reduce drift right off the bat reduce pressure 100% agree right so you drop the pressure down to 30 PSI you keep the same nozzle and you reduced fines from 26% down to 15% that's good what did that cost you see a few people saying nothing that's not the correct answer cost you volume which costs you time and efficiency right you just cut your output in half so now you're losing on the efficiency front Okay well how do we get our efficiency back how can we get our time back and reduce drift potential Lo tip size it's exactly right so we jump from an 025 we double it to an 05 so now we got our efficiency back we're back up to speed we've reduced our pressure and now again we reduced our drift potential down to 7.6% what's the next thing we can do to reduce drift potential even further this is where I start stumping people so you could um I tend to always look at this uh like a pair of binoculars so you have a a course adjustment knob and a fine adjustment knob right the course adjustment knob is going to be nozzle selection hint hint wink wink okay the fine adjustment knob is the adant side of things and so you can do a lot more damage a lot get there a lot closer with the nozzle selection the adant fine-tunes it at the very end so not the wrong not a wrong idea but it's just kind of down the road yet right so the hint I gave you is changing the nozzle type right so instead of an XR nozzle we switch to a TT nozzle so a turbo tjet and it drops us down even more to 2.8% fines and then if we add the you know some of the latest uh nozzle technology the air induction part and we move to a TTI nozzle now all of a sudden we've dropped all the way down to 0.2%

fines so we started at 26% fines 26% potential highly driftable and with literally one change of the nozzles all we would have had to do we can drop all the way down to 0.2% high potential for drift that's really big that's really important to talk about okay again have those conversations with the applicators that hey we got to start maybe thinking about getting some new nozzles on this thing instead of running the ones that we were still running in 1985 okay so nozzles are a big deal for trying to reduce drip adans can then help on the back end and fine tuna even a little bit more for drift you're not going to fine-tune it I would fine-tune this though hopefully for like a surfactant or an oil or something else right to help with either the spread or the retention or other things because you get this big of a droplet size you're going to start running into other issues for the efficacy standpoint so you'll fine-tune it for other reasons the drift part you're probably pretty well maxed out at that point it's a good questiones your DSI again so if you increase the PSI again you're going to increase your your or decrease your droplet size again with the TTI it doesn't change drastically like I don't have the number so don't quote me on this number as gospel but you know you might go from 0.2% if you jump up to to say 60 PSI maybe you go to 1% maybe do you all agree with that okay well close enough yes I mean and one your speed is already up there just with your nozzle size too you know but some guys like to run higher pressures honestly sometimes I'm a higher pressure guy because I think we do better with our Spray Systems with higher pressure so yeah I wouldn't disagree to me the main thing thing is is that nozzle selection right I think that is the biggest driver for most of this over a lot of these other things I think pressure can fine-tune some things kind of like we talked about with Adin yep all right any other questions more coverage if you're at the same concentration is always better except for maybe crop injury if we start working in crop injury into this that's another gamut too right because more coverage with crop injury say cobra on beans get more coverage you're going to burn them even more right uh but as far as weed control goes no less coverage with the same concentration is not going to ever be better now the the conversation though goes if you're doing less volume most of the time you have a more concentrated droplet then there is potential I I don't want to say that you can get better weed control but you can get equivalent weed control we'll talk about this in a little bit with some drone applications so Roundup Roundup is one of the best examples it actually does better in low volumes with more concentrated droplets like if you could if people could run round up at 3 GPA all the time it actually does better uh you run into other problems kind of on the back end though like the coverage part and stuff like that like if you can make sure the droplets are landing and sticking and everything else 3gpa will do better with Roundup but there there's different caveats in there um but yes it with more concentrated droplets in less volume you there are certain herbicides that can do just as well I actually will show you from a drone study you'd be pleasantly surprised even with a contact like REM oxone at a low volume that it can still do some pretty good weed control work so again it's always that Balancing Act between droplet size and spray volume I don't want to just push 20 GPA on youall trust me I I try and tell guys you don't need to run 20 GPA all the time but if you get shoved into a big droplet size you tend to need more volume at that point to get enough coverage enough droplets Landing to get your we control does that all make sense does that answer okay that's a very good question I appreciate that we're going to do a whole a whole diversion on this one all right no you're good so it is it's a very good question because I hear this all the time too okay because a lot of times too I'll get told or asked the question or just told well I need to jack up my pressure to force those droplets down in the canopy right anybody heard that before okay it's somewhat of a fallacy and it also is very dependent on what goal of the application is okay so there's two things I'll talk about here so the first thing I'll talk about if you want to penetrate into a canopy bigger droplet size is always better bigger droplets have more mass and technically more terminal velocity they are going to force their way through a canopy better than a small droplet size even at a High Vol at a high pressure right because small those small droplets you may be pumping it at 80 psi but those things hit their terminal velocity within like 6 in of the dang nozzle and at that point they are way lower speed because they're just they don't have much mass tool so larger droplets are better to penetrate the canopy no matter what okay but now the conversation comes in particularly with fungicides this is a really big deal is where's the target at okay so if we're talking corn and we're trying to get down to the ear or the ear leaf and you got all this canopy above it right you're going to want a bigger droplet size to force it through all of that and even though it's a bigger size you're going to be better off because it's making its way through and getting down to where it needs to be a finer spray will get caught all on the top and just won't ever make it down to that yearly now the conversation changes though say we go to wheat and we talk about like wheat head scap you want all of that spray to literally sit at the top and go nowhere else right so then a really fine spray with low velocity is a lot better because you get it to just sit right there on top and it's not trying to go anywhere so that's the that's the balancing act is is what's your what's your goal where do you got to get the droplets to and then from there but I will say larger drop if you're trying to actually penetrate larger droplets are always a better way to go very good question so so the question was droplet size versus PR versus posts much much much more uh efficient for posts right much more required for post there's been some research done on PR and and the different things generally it's really hit or miss you know sometimes you will get a result that shows yeah matter sometimes you won't it kind of depends on what your environment is right if you're no till if you're tilled and you got clouds if it's a nice fine soil type depends on what kind of precipitation and activating rainfall and moisture you get so it's kind of all over the board so generally speaking like broad General extension recommendation I generally say for PR it doesn't matter you know I like a bigger droplet size because it reduces drift if you've got like a cover crop that you're trying to get it down through that residue generally a bigger droplet size is probably better for some of that um so PR I generally say let's run a bigger size and we'll be good uh posts is where it gets much more picky on what you want to do yeah good question so almost every night we have temperature inversions I mean it's basically like 90% of the time pretty much you have a temperature inversion at night now it's depends on where in the atmosphere right it may be right at the ground it may 10 ft in the air something else but yes almost every single night there's a temperature inversion Dusk and Dawn are like the almost the worst terrible times to be trying to apply because you're getting into that window uh the reason temperature inversions are such a big deal is because basically your wind your air movement is not moving and you have this layer where it's just stuck and so if you spray those droplets will hit that layer and then just sit there they can't drop they can't fall out of the sky well and then if even in just a 3 mph wind right where it's just maybe lightly moveing as long as that layer is there those droplets just stay suspended and it'll just move all night until the temperature finally changes and they can fall out and that'll land Wherever Whenever Whatever right so they are a big deal again the reason we don't talk about them a lot is because it's basically at night we rarely see them during the middle of the day and I can tell you from a weed sence standpoint we don't want folks spraying at night anyway we lose weed control by spraying at night it's you need to spray in the day yes so so you know again watch out for them it is a big thing especially now when we're getting into the Drone world the man Pilots have known about inversions their entire lives if you really want to learn about inversions go talk to a pilot okay because they have to know about it because that is causes a very turbulent ride in their plane if they are flying through an inversion so they have dealt with inversions their entire life they are way more advanced on this than any of the rest of us when it comes to this um but basically it's you just got to know almost every night you're going to have one uh a lot of places I don't know if Wisconsin has like a mezzet right now so okay I was going to say so you can look up sign some different mezzan Nets and see and they'll trigger you know like hey we we have an inversion at this point you know and you can start setting up some alerts and stuff like that so that's a really good way to monitor it but my extension side of things is just every night you're basically going to have inversion we lose weed control Anyway by spraying at night we got to just spray during the day and try and cover the Acres when we can cover the Acres at that point but I will also say the other recommendation I normally give with inversions is who here would rather spray in a 15 mph wind versus a 2 to 3 mph wind you and me Dan I would pick a 15 mph wind every day of the week over a two to three M hour wind you know why yes is well that's fair more spray days if it's blowing 15 miles hour wind if it's blowing 15 miles an hour that wind direction is probably not changing right it's going one way and you know exactly where it's going you can manage your stuff a whole lot better when you know exactly where it's going you can leave a buffer zone come back and hit a pass another day uh you know maybe you choose I can't spray that field today but I can go spray these fields you can do some things when it's 2 to 3 miles an hour a lot of times you might be in an inversion and then that stuff can go miles the wind directions probably shifting on you so you may think you're safe because it initially started blowing you know to the South and all of a sudden it switches and blows to the north and you smack your neighbor up there like I said I would choose a higher wind speed every day of the week because I know where it's going I can manage it better than when it's at real low zero to three M hour wind speed a lot of our labels anymore now are starting to go to the standpoint of you can't spray when it's less than three anyway right okay these are all great questions I appreciate this anything else before I move on all right let's crank through some things here quick uh nozzles I'll go through this relatively fast the main thing on nozzles that I want to get get yall to know about those so when you call Rodrigo or me or anybody else you can give us some solid information okay how many people if you if if you're calling and you're trying to get a nozzle recommendation you're trying to explain what you're sprayer setup is how many people can you can legitimately say what nozzle you have on the sprayer okay I see about five to 10 hands maybe how many of the rest of you would call and tell me I got the red one please be fair and raise your hands trust me that is the number one response I get I've got the red ones okay I've got my nozzle kit up here that I wanted to show you I have no two similar nozzles in this kit see how many red ones I got in there you basically tell me nothing when you tell me I got the red one all right so what the red tells you is your float rate so I'll just throw these three things up here all these nozzles will give you basically three different things on them that that are useful information normally they'll tell you what type it is so this is a wer nozzle this is an MR if you can tell me it's an MR I automatically know what droplet size range you're in it tells me kind of where you're at if you tell me it's an aisr versus a TT ey I know the very different designs that those nozzles are and what they're doing okay so that's important the 110 gives you the fan angle right so it's 110 degree fan angle and then the last number is the flow rate which in this case it's an 04 that means at 40 PSI this nozzle gets me4 gallons per minute that is also what the color tells you so the red color tells me I get4 gallons per minute so like I said when you call and tell me I got the red ones I'm like great I know your flow rate I need more okay so I wanted you to know that uh there's all kinds of different types and how they're designed the air induction versus non-air induction the TTI which has a turbulence chamber and does some different things with sprays which we'll talk about in my presentation this afternoon the main thing on this front especially from y'all for mainly being consultants and agronomist in here that I want you to know this and have a conversation with your applicators is sizing and how important it is to get the right size nozzles on your sprayer so real quick we're going to do a little bit math I apologize okay I'm not a math guy either but we got to do it for sizing this equation is very very important learn it memorize it save it whatever you need to do so GPA by the nozzle spacing by the miles an hour and we divide it by 5940 so we got a little example up here if we want to spray at 10 GPA we have 20in spacing on our sprayer and we want to travel 20 miles an hour now I'm coming from Arkansas where 20 is slow okay I know it's not the same up here but let me tell you Indiana 20 is basically slow at this point too but that's the speed I picked just for this example right so if you do that equation it comes out to 67 which means I I have 67 GP gallons per minute that I need out of my nozzles so with that result you can either choose an 06 a gray nozzle and operate it at 54 PSI that gets you your output or you could pick an 08 nozle if you wanted and get at 31 PSI and get that output I'm good with both of those right they're decent pressure you're getting your output looks good to me if you've got a pulsing sprayer you can operate that at 40 PSI and just keep it there right because the pulsing the way those operate is you just hold a constant pressure and it'll pulse to get your output correct so what that does we hold it at a constant 40 PSI we stick a 10 on it this is like the most common nozzle I see on those pulsing sprayers is a as a 10 size so one gallon per minute that's going to operate at about a 70% duty cycle so basically it's on 70% of the time I'm also okay with that now the problem comes in when we're not operating at 20 miles an hour anymore because all of a sudden we have to switch to our Headlands right or we get down somewhere where we're concerned about drift next to a neighbor or something else so we shift down to 12 miles an hour rather than 20 now if you run the math we have to have4 gallons per minute on this all of a sudden that 06 nozzle is only at 18 PSI that 08 nozzles only at 10 psi they don't like that they're not forming patterns that's going to be ugly and streak the field if you got a pulse and sprayer you're still at 40 PSI it's dropped down to only a 40% duty cycle so it's only on 40% of the time those systems don't like that they start doing weird things with spray patterns and droplet size and everything else so the main message with this nozzle sizing use that equation and don't just factor in your max speed that you want to run at all the time factor in the range of speeds that you're going to be traveling so you can pick a nozzle that'll sit in the middle that'll handle both all right that's important on this you also need to factor in a nozzle that's probably going to handle different volumes if you're going to do different volumes right 10 GPA is very different than 15 or 20 with the sizing that you need and the speeds you want to travel at so use that equation make sure we're picking nozzles appropriately all right this there's two places in the country where I can use a Brett be a meme and everybody will laugh at it Arkansas and Wisconsin right so I just want to make sure well yeah Illinois too but you know no nobody likes Illinois so uh I just want to make sure that we are not looking like Brett belma all right are we all not confused are we all doing okay okay everybody thank Ryan and Illinois for taking you know Brett be off our hands we're all very appreciative thank you I know it's great appreciate it all right uh real quick uh dual fans versus single fans I won't get into a lot of this but there's a lot of talk about using dual fan nozzles originally I was kind of a dual fan hater all right because we had done some research that showed uh dual fans didn't really get us any better coverage than some of our single fans so this is the AI ttj a dual fan versus the aixr which is a single fan uh TTI 60 a dual fan versus a TTI single fan we didn't really get any better coverage so I was kind of a hater about it I was like they generally are more expensive we're not getting better coverage I I don't see the point did some followup research though and we looked at deposits not just that coverage number because we talked about that coverage number potentially being biased a little bit right this is where it gets interesting is when you look at deposits on those cards the Dual fans are actually doing something so the AIT TJ that dual fan versus axr single fan had a bigger droplet size by about 150 microns almost and got more deposits on target for us the same goes for the TTI 60 versus the TTI uh a little bit smaller size but got way more deposits on Target and the TTI 60 which is a bigger size by double 600 microns versus 300 had equal deposits on that card as the aisr that's really promising for getting droplets to the Target right and then if we looked at some weed control stuff this was barnyard grass uh barnyard grass is a big deal in Arkansas okay uh if you look at panicle counts and you look at the seed production from those plants those Trends if I back up real quick here follow that exact inverse pattern right the ones that had the most deposits the XR had the least amount of seed production and the least panicle heads the ones that had the most uh or the least deposits had the most seed production and the most seed heads so there's more to these than just coverage when we talk about coverage coverage coverage and I've hit on it a lot today there's still this deposit factor and these other things going on too and I've actually kind of switch the my my script a little bit on these dual fans I think we need some more research yet but I actually feel a little bit more positive on them now there is they are doing something else in the background there even though it doesn't come through on coverage it comes through on deposits and some on the weed control front too so I'm not recommending to just like go out and buy all dual fans like I don't want you to just do that but just be aware they may an option they may help out in certain situations all right so now the selection key we hit on all that Jesus okay we'll skip over aerial applications we won't talk about that this is this is when you know you got a good extension speaker you just start Speed running through stuff all right okay spray drones real quick I do have to hit on this though uh we did a study I'll be honest again I was a hater on spray drones I was like there's no way these things can work this is we're going to make sure that we set these up for failure in this study so I don't have to talk about bottom and do research anymore that was literally my goal with this study okay so with this study we were spraying we were using a spray drone a T30 so it is a little older technology now at this point but a T30 at 2 and five GPA comparing it to a mudmaster ground rig which is just kind of a a small ground rig setup basically right and we were operating that at 10 GPA basically commercial comparisons right and we tested three different nozzles an XR flat fan a tadf dual fan and a a UL highpro uh high pro UL so basically a medium spray about a coarse spray and then like an extremely coarse spray got three different droplet siiz classes I'll show you weed control in a second but what we were spraying was gramoxone at a low label rate and and we had weeds that were basically knee high told you I was setting this up for failure right I'm like this I'm going to show this doesn't work and we're going to be done with this all right when we look at coverage cards when we look at a fine spray we see what we expect right as we incre in spray volume we increased our coverage okay so we went to from 10% to 26% okay yippy don't know about weed control yet but we got better coverage better chances there but what was really interesting is when we look at the larger droplet sizes when we look at 5 GPA versus 10 GPA we had the exact same level of coverage drone 5 GPA versus the ground Ray at 10 GPA that shows some promise that we got really good coverage coming out of that it seems really effective now the 2 GPA treatment had me a little bit worried because we never got over 5% coverage okay that's a little that's a little bit concerning from a weed control standpoint but let's get to where the rubber meets the road and we talk about the actual weed control standpoint again gramoxone low label rate pretty tall weeds this is the aerial shot of it the yellow boxes are 2 GPA out of the Drone little bit of green but not too bad if we to the drone at 5 GPA looks a lot I shouldn't say a lot better but it does look better I think you can pick it out that it is a little bit more Brown a little less green and if we go to the mud Master which is the black box is at 10 GPA I don't see much of a difference than that with the drone at 5 GPA right it looks pretty darn clo pretty darn similar when we look at the actual data the ratings at four weeks after said that the 2 GPA treatment lag behind a little bit so we got 70% control versus 85% control uh with the 5 GPA treatment from the Drone and 10 GPA out of the mud master so 2 GPA lag behind just a little bit but what was interesting is there was no difference in biomass and when we look at a greenness index four weeks after application there was no difference in that greenness index so I say that all to say a drone at 2 GPA too is honestly looking like it can do just as good of a job for weed control as 5 GPA out of a drone or 10 GPA out of a mudmaster now please don't run away with this and tell like again say we're good at 2 GPA for all drone applications we're great no I'm not saying that but this made me really rethink some of this there's other things going on with drones especially with gramoxone at a 2 GPA rate that blew my mind okay so we got to do some more research and fine-tune these things a little bit more but it does look like there is some opportunity here where they can do a good job and still get us weed control even at low volumes now that's not talking about the label considerations okay that's a whole another conversation but just from a practicality standpoint it does seem like they are a little bit feasible which is really interesting uh I do want to mention this though one complication with this oh sorry go ahead okay so one complication with these spray drones though is the spray SWOT everything you do whether it's a different drone a different nozzle a different flight height a different window Direction in speed your swath width is going to change though so this is where it gets complicated especially if you're doing trying to do overlap in multiple passes okay so I bring that up to show this example here the XR at 2 GPA we just did this this year at Purdue the XR at 2 GPA this is 30 feet wide in the system we said it was supposed to be a 20 foot swap that xr2 GPA doesn't really look like a 20ft swath right we got droplets all the way out for that full 30 foot pretty consistent when we jumped it up to 5 GPA the way we did that was we just slowed it down okay so we changed our speed it funneled all of that spray because it was going slower right into the middle now all of a sudden our spray swath is maybe you know 10 12 feet or so 15 feet at the most so we're not hitting our 20 foot swath that we put in the system when we went to a bigger droplet size 2 and 5 GPA this the speed didn't matter as much for the big droplet size but the bigger droplet size still funneled it in the middle and we don't have a 20ft swath there either we're only sitting at about 10 to 15t or so well if we're really only getting 10 to 15 foot but our system thinks it's 20 you can see the problem right we're going to end up with with skips in the field uh and streaks so we still again still have kinks to work out we can work them out we just need some more time on these things but again there there is more room for opportunity than I originally thought with these things and we just got to kind of fine-tune them a little bit more all right technology here's my view of Technology right for weed control which is dynamite it all uh there is some really cool things I won't talk about this very much but the CN spray or the one smart spray where we're starting to detect weeds live on the go and only spray where we see them okay this is really probably the wave of the future now we're still not there yet either we still need some time on this front we still got to work out the economics some on this uh so there is still some room to grow but there is a ton of Market opportunities right now I can I have lost count of the number of startups and Venture companies that are getting into this weed control world uh and so competition drives down prices so five years from now we're going to get there it's just going to take some time but there's a lot of opportunities here for either you know more selectively managing weeds reducing our total total chemical output which will be big for regulatory concerns in The Endangered Species Act moving forward uh but also maybe reducing uh some of our crop injury right so we talked about Cobra earlier when we absolutely annihilate our beans for that week or two if we spray a full rate of Cobra whereas if we can selectively apply it a little bit we can reduce some of that burn and maybe those Growers aren't calling us upset that their you know Bean crop looks just smoked out there for a week or two uh and then on top of that there's just a hundred other new technologies going on at this point that we're testing and is going to be the wave of the future weed control is drastically going to change over the next 5 to 10 years the simple Silver Bullet of pick a herbicide and spray it and we walk away from the field is no longer our an option or our future all right the pipelines for herbicides is very limited and there's still quite a ways out you know I mean several years next decade kind of thing so that's not going to be a huge thing it's going to be a wave of these different Technologies and integrated weed management strategies so things like robotics things like Precision tillage pieces of equipment which can sense the crop roll and maybe we can do some interal cultivation a little bit easier uh laser weeding which is pretty cool or even Harvest weed seed control stuff like that okay now any last minute questions before I go even more over my time all right so with that I'll just throw this up here this should be my contact info I also appreciate that nobody threw anything at me from being from Purdue today and wearing Purdue outfits I stopped a quick trip and thought I was going to get shanked in there but that's all right uh so if you have any questions I'm going be here all day I've got another talk this afternoon that will cover more on kind of the chemistries and some herbicide recommendations and some of the interactions between nozzles and adents and things that we didn't really hit on this morning so otherwise any questions please feel free to hit me up awesome thank y'all

2024-11-12 20:06

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