Saving Money and Pesticides for Apple Growers -- Gleason, Ivey, Meyer
so welcome everyone joining in you're attending the north central integrated Pest Management Center pests and progress webinar um my name is Laura Iles I'm one of the co-directors of the north central integrated Pest Management Center there are four Regional integrated Pest management centers all supported by USDA NIFA Crop Protection and Pest Management Regional coordination program and the north central Pest Management program we have the mission to share IPM across the region promote IPM research extension all those things and we're very excited to be hosting today's webinar if you have questions there's a Q&A part at the bottom of your Zoom screen so you see that little Q&A feel free to post questions for our speakers in there if you're just having trouble hearing or something like that feel free to post that in the chat um the chat will be monitored by us hosts so I'm excited today for our talk on Saving Money and Pesticides for Apple Growers with New Spray Technology and Warning Systems and I'm going to let you get started Mark and introduce our speakers and take it away hi everybody can you hear me okay yes I'm Mark Gleason I'm a plant pathologist at Iowa State and I'm the Project Director for this particular project that's been going on for about three years and uh so uh there's three presenters today and so Liv why don't you go ahead hi my name is Liv I'm a graduate student working under Dr Gleason happy to be here Melanie hi I'm Melanie Lewis Ivey and I'm at the Ohio State University and I'm on the Wooster campus and I am the fruit pathologist the state fruit pathologist and fresh produce safety specialist okay well we'll uh we'll get started here and cover these two related but somewhat differing subjects uh today and uh we'll just uh get going on that the first aspect that we wanted to cover is our work with this uh novel um uh type of of Orchard sprayer called the intelligent sprayer it's um it's it's an outgrowth of the Airblast sprayer which has been around as long as I have which is a long time at least since the 1950s this has been the standard for pesticide and other applications in the in the in the apple orchard but uh but um you know there's some some issues with uh with the airblast and it has done a nice job for pests and Disease Control if we get our timing and our rates right but um and and the technology is very familiar uh to uh to most commercial Apple Growers uh but the negatives is it it's a it is somewhat prone to to spray drift as anybody who's used them knows and um unfortunately a fair amount of the spray misses the target this intelligent sprayer is uh direct development of research and uh and uh engineering by Dr Heping Zhu who's a an engineer at the USDA spray lab in Wooster Ohio and he's been doing this work for more than a decade um and uh and developing a prototype and then has has gotten it far enough that it is uh commercially available now a company that's manufacturing it is called Smart Apply Incorporated in in Indianapolis okay so what's different about the intelligent sprayer what makes it intelligent well uh one thing is uh that it uses LiDAR which maybe have turned familiar to you um it's it's a it's a laser pulse uh that's released by the sprayer and then bounces off the tree and the reason we're showing a bat here is uh that uh there's an analogy to the way a bat Finds Its food uh in the environment it puts out these uh high frequency uh sound pulses and they bounce off insects and other things to tell the bat uh where there's something to eat well in the case of the intelligent sprayer um the purpose is a little different the pulses go out and they're they're not um ultrasonic they're they're laser but they get reflected off the apple tree and they essentially tell the sprayer those Reflections tell the sprayer where the tree is and uh and how how dense the canopy is so the the sprayer in real time develops this picture of of uh the the presence and the location of the tree and the um and the density of the tree and uh this information goes very quickly to the the nozzles that enables the nozzles to turn on and off and Target the particular trees that are there if you're looking at it it doesn't look a whole lot different than a uh than a standard AirBlast except there's some add-ons here uh in the cab there's a tablet a user interface tablet computer that sits in the cab and enables you to make a lot of adjustments and take a lot of data on how much the spray you're applying as well and then there's the LiDAR sensing device which is this unit that you see in the middle there kind of poking up behind the uh behind the cab and the nozzles are different than what you see on a standard Air Blast there what's called pulse width modulation Valves and they can turn on and off very quickly so they can respond to information from the from the LiDAR that tells it where the where the where the vegetation is in the row and how dense it is so this is very much a a sprayer that can see there is an analogy to driverless cars that you may have heard of or drive driverless trucks for that matter uh where the LiDAR units the technology uh as the intelligent Sprayer sits on top of the of the vehicle and um laser uh Reflections uh help to help the vehicle determine where it is in space and and to hopefully control it now we're going to switch now to uh to hearing from Liv uh talking about some of her uh findings in in an orchard um using the intelligent sprayer at uh in Iowa so Liv it's all yours thank you so we had conducted a three-year research study at the Iowa State Horticulture research station in Gilbert Iowa we were working with about an acre block of Golden Delicious apples and they were on um a vertical axis training system sorry going ahead thank you would you like me to say next for the slides that would all help me yes thank you okay okay thank you so in comparing the intelligent sprayer as Dr Gleason had talked about versus the standard Air Blast sprayer one of the things that we wanted to look at was our volume output per spray using the different sprayer types So In This research we had compared the standard Air Blast sprayer which we had calibrated to 100 gallons per acre and then we had used the intelligent sprayer and the intelligent sprayer we chose two different rates to compare to the standard Air Blast sprayer rate next this slide is a bar graph that represents the spray volume savings that we saw using the intelligent sprayer at both of the rates we had chosen compared to that standard Air Blast sprayer so on the vertical axis you can see the percent of spray volume saved and on the horizontal axis you can see the years so 2020 through 2022 and the volume saved per season so the blue bars represent the spray volume saved using the intelligent sprayer compared to the standard Airblast sprayer using a low flow rate and the gray bars using a high flow rate with that intelligent sprayer so you can see in 2020 we had started with two rates and we saw a savings of about 30 percent using that low flow rate and a savings of about 20 percent using that high flow rate in the intelligent sprayer compared to the standard sprayer in 2021 and 2022 our group had decided to drop our rates to sort of see how low we could go compared to the standard sprayer and we saw even greater savings so with that low rate between the two years we saw about 50 to 60 percent and with that high rate between the two years between 40 to 50 percent savings next so on average the intelligent sprayer using the intelligent sprayer you can save approximately 30 to 60 percent per spray versus just using the standard Airblast sprayer in your Orchards so why do we see the savings well as Dr Gleason had talked about with the technology that the intelligent sprayer uses it's much more accurate and so it's really only going to put out or apply pesticides onto the canopy so if you have large gaps in the canopy or we had a Derecho a few years ago which is a very intense Windstorm that took out many of our trees so we actually have a lot of gaps in our Orchards right now using that standard sprayer it would be applying pesticides in those gaps using the intelligent sprayer those nozzles are actually going to turn off because there's no canopy to spray next so what does this mean for larger acreages and tank mixes and having to go back and refill because using that intelligent sprayer we're not applying pesticides in spaces where we don't need to apply them we actually save and conserve on volume to be able to put pesticides out and to cover more area than we traditionally could with that standard Air Blast sprayer next so what does this mean on a per spray basis well the biggest thing is the time of the growing season so earlier on you don't have as much volume in your canopy so there's less tissue for the intelligent sprayer to see and to spray later on as the canopy develops and you see more volume more density there will be a lot more tissue to spray so it's going to be putting more volume out there are other more Orchard specific factors so I had said we work we're working with a vertical axis system a lot of people now I think are when they're putting in new Orchards they're looking at more of those tall spindle high density plantings the trees are a lot smaller in height for some of the rootstock that you're using so there's not as much to spray height wise and the canopy is a lot smaller than what you would see on maybe a semi-dwarfing rootstock in those vertical axis systems pruning is also big so if if some things have happened on your farm you weren't able to maintenance as much as you would like um you weren't able to cut out some of the branches or dead wood that you had seen there's more to spray there versus yeah if you're keeping up with maintenance and you're pruning and you're really training that canopy to look like what you want it to look like and to be optimal for the apple trees growth and development there's less to spray so there are also other factors to consider on an individual spray basis as well as total volume over the entire growing season next so the second thing we wanted to look at was spray coverage so with the intelligent sprayer we saw savings but how does that compare to the coverage that we see using the standard Air Blast sprayer and so the image above where it says water sensitive papers this is how we collected the coverage data water sensitive papers are these yellow cards so when they're exposed to an aqueous solution they turn blue and the other picture where you've got sort of this number system superimposed onto this yellow apple tree this is where we had placed the cards in the trees when we had done these water sensitive paper tests and this was just to get an idea as to the coverage that we saw comparing both sprayer types in many different locations of the tree so further into the Tree close to the leader further out on either sides at different heights things like that we wanted to just get a general idea as to what kind of coverage we saw throughout the entire tree as opposed to specific locations next so for the coverage dates and like we had talked about it really depends on where you're at in the season with how much the intelligent sprayer is putting out compared to that standard sprayer we also wanted to get a good representation of canopy volume throughout the season so we had taken coverage data at the very beginning of the Season where it was about half a quarter inch green half inch green things like that then we had taken it a little bit later when the canopy volume filled out and increased so around bloom a little bit after bloom and then our last date was pre-harvest when we saw full bloom and the apples had put on size next so these cards represent the coverage that we saw using a low flow rate with the intelligent sprayer a high flow rate with the intelligent sprayer and then that 100 gallons per acre rate for our standard sprayer and the position that we had chose to show in today's webinar series was the position two so that middle section on that central leader we had just placed the card right on the trunk of the tree there as you can see with the low flow rate and the intelligent sprayer we see about a three percent coverage savings or excuse me coverage spray coverage using the high rate so that's 0.09 we saw about a 25 percent spray coverage and that's very comparable to the standard rate at that hundred gallons per acre so using the high flow rate with the intelligent sprayer and the standard sprayer at 100 gallons per acre we actually see similar spray coverage on those cards and this is representative of actually all of the locations on the tree for the spray coverage cards that we had seen and the data that we had taken and I also want to note that when we had done these tests we weren't using any adjuvants or spreaders or anything like that no pesticides we were just using water so the implications there are if you're using a spreader you could achieve more coverage than that 25 percent but still putting on at that high rate next so again we see equivalent coverage so we talked about spray volume savings we saw similar coverage but what about adequate Pest and disease management at the end of the season and I think on the next slide in Iowa over all three years at the end of the season we had harvested apples taken a look at incidents of Sooty blotch and fly speck which is one of the diseases as well as fire blight in The Orchards and we saw equivalent control in each of our treatment plots with the intelligent sprayer compared to our standard sprayer and it's also important to note that these were dry years as well and then I think there's a note on the next slide about the Ohio so I'll let Dr Ivey take over for this one okay I didn't know I was taking over no problem though so uh in um we did both these studies in Iowa and Ohio and we used um we looked use in Orchards that were experimental or high density but we also had demonstration trials at two different Growers locations in Ohio and we evaluated uh disease so any type of disease whether it was a rot or um scab and then we also looked at uh pest injury and we saw equivalent control in all three of the years both within our experimental Fields but also within our demonstration trials and so in fact one grower has started to or purchased last year the spray technology and is now using it based on the um the research that we've done here in Ohio and Iowa so that's my input the only I don't know if you want to comment on this because this is Ohio data you could okay sure well so then we were interested in how long it would take um to pay back the intelligent sprayer because it is an investment and uh the the cost of it varies depending on whether or not you you know buy a brand new sprayer or if you have it retrofitted whether or not you you know take the sprayer and get it retrofitted at the um provider or if you have to you know deliver it there and get it back so the costs differ um depending on the the um the type of spray system that you end up purchasing and you can see here that if you look um at the very bottom where is one acre it will only take you around um 112 years to pay off the sprayer which obviously that's um not not feasible but if you look up into the um you know 20 to 50 acres then you're getting down to three and a half in 20 for a 20 Acre Farm three and a half years to pay it off versus a 50-acre farm where it will only take about um a year to pay it off and we've considered the cost Savings in fungicides as well as the differences in the amount of time or or labor to to do the spray for this and I think if you if you advance that there's an average that we show on here yeah so less than two years for a 50 plus acre Orchard and this is based on high density uh plantings okay uh thanks Melanie I'll just uh wrap it up here for the intelligent sprayer just to repeat what we've said the intelligent sprayer in our trials saved uh 30 to 60 percent uh in spray volume with the same pests and Disease Control as you would get on the on the standard Air Blast it is commercially available it is uh expensive but then the payback for larger Orchards is is fairly short we are doing an economic analysis as a uh Melanie alluded to and that bottom line on the economic analysis for both Iowa and Ohio data we'll be coming up very soon we have a couple of really good economists working with us so I think at this point we'll uh we'll stop and uh and ask for questions with regard to this intelligent sprayer um uh field work does anybody have any questions before we jump into the second part which is uh having to do more with Warning Systems um yeah you thank you guys for the first part so you mentioned that it's commercially available like where I mean where would one start even searching for an intelligent sprayer if they're interested well there's the the company and uh I think it's called Smart Apply these days Smart Apply Incorporated is that right Melanie I think that's right they're in Indianapolis um and they've been uh in some of the larger trade shows showing but they're also working through a number of dealerships so I understood from Doctor Zhu that uh they're working through John Deere John Deere dealerships around the country as well as several other um uh you know larger equipment providers they're not they're not manufacturing it but they're they're taking orders uh on it there and then they're coming from the from Indianapolis very good and we had a question from one of our attendees um in the Q&A it says I have a small Orchard and this technology is too large for me I use a backpack sprayer but I do have an electrostatic sprayer used for applying titanium dioxide would that sprayer be able to attract the electromatic spray to the foliar canopy you want to handle this Melanie or so okay let me take a shot at you and correct me where I'm wrong electrostatic is a is a technology that um that spray Engineers have been working with a number of years and the idea is um that the spray droplets released by the sprayer uh could have a charge that was opposite to the charge on leaves and foliage of the tree and therefore there'd be an electrostatic attraction between the positive and negative positive um coming off the sprayer and the negative on the tree and um that that would make for greater accuracy in uh in the spray I'm not getting around to answering your question because I think the answer would depend on the specific kind of equipment um what I'd ask is if you put the uh put your email address in the chat we can do a little research for you uh we we need to ask you a little bit more detail about the sprayer model and see if we can come up with a better uh answer because I think the answer may be specific to your equipment we just need some more details maybe great thank you yes please go ahead and put information in the chat and we'll make sure to get that to you Mark so you can do that information any other questions over just intelligent sprayer I put the link um in the chat box to the the company um Smart Apply and I also put a link to um our website which is based at Iowa where you can find more resources on the intelligent sprayer and warning systems and the research we've done on on this um system there's a lot of good stuff on that website um podcasts with a whole variety of people in the in the in the entire realm of uh spraying and apple IPM and um blogs and uh videos and so forth kind of makes it come alive so it's probably worth your while take a look at that um question um what is the recommended intelligent spray rate to use in apple okay and that's a really good question and and just chime in here Melanie or Liv if I'm misleading here but um I think the answer is it depends um it may depend on a number of factors like some of the ones that Liv mentioned um and it may have to be customized to your orchard we've been using and talked about spray um rates like .06 and .09 those are settings for the intelligent sprayer but I think to get the most efficiency this will probably have to be customized to the particular Orchard when Melanie was talking about high density Orchard versus uh semi-dwarf or older Orchards the the answer may be different it may also be dependent on the uh the extent to uh which the pruning has been done and so forth you want to add anything Mel yeah I think you know that be when when we think of sprayer rate with the intelligent spray we're not talking about a volume per gallon you know rather it's you know the amount of or the flow of the of the fungicide through the nozzles and so that 0.06 to 0.09 within that range you you should um get good coverage um targeted coverage and good Disease Control those are the two rates that we've tested and ideally you know you would you would select one of those rates you wouldn't want to go below it and you could possibly go above it but if by going above it then you're losing out on your savings um because you're putting um you know a higher flow rate so more more fungicide or insecticide that that's going out we have evaluated this in grapes and we looked at three different rates and grapes and we looked at across in the west and as well as here in Ohio and and we determined you know for grapes that the rate really does matter and so we were able to figure out what the low what the low rate would be to give adequate control versus being too low so I I definitely wouldn't recommend going below that 0.06 you know in order to achieve the Disease Control that that
you're looking for of course you know if you have a really high disease pressure year you might you might need to increase it but um staying within that range is recommended and you also with the system we didn't talk about it go into the details but you you will put in there the width of your rows and so that you're making sure that the spray you know distance is optimized and so a lot of the there's a lot of variables that not a lot but several that you input into the computer and then it does all the work for you okay and I think kind of a follow-up it says regarding the Iowa spray cover data does the 0.06 rate provide three percent coverage only all over the tree canopy Liv you want to comment sure so yeah that um that slide that had shown the pictures that was that was pretty accurate as far as yeah with all the locations in the tree um it could vary between three percent and ten percent things like that at that rate but I also want to emphasize too that we did see similar um adequate pests and Disease Control at the end of the season using all of those rates and we didn't use adjuvants or spreaders for that as well you know which I know is common for a lot of Growers to use to make sure that they're not only getting the pesticides on the plant but they're getting the coverage that they want after applying so that was just water that we had used in that so no no spreaders or adjuvants or anything like that but yeah I would say that three percent coverage again it varied between three and ten percent using that rate in all the locations on the tree that we had taken that data just to add to that um uh we have uh Dr Zhu um uh Heping Zhu who developed the intelligent sprayer uh has some very nice videos of what a droplet looks like um with a spreader added to it and it really covers a a a considerably larger area because it doesn't bead up as much as it would on a waxy coated leaf leaves have a naturally waxy coat so it kind of breaks that surface tension in the in the drops spread out but as Liv said she was working with um water no pesticide no spreader so that would be a kind of a minimum result for what she got that'd be a real stringent test but you know the other the other thing is you can use spray cards to see what your pattern is looking like they're not hard to use give yourself an idea in your particular Orchard situation with your particular trees and you know Etc what what are your does your spray pattern look like um you know in various parts of the tree in in Ohio we we used our our fungicide mix so we didn't use just water and our coverage um was a bit higher um we were definitely within um you know the 10 to 25 percent and you know generally I think it depends on who you talk to um but you know we have been you know working with Heping Zhu and basically anything over you know 40 or 50 percent is excessive and so you want to try and stay you know in in the range that you're not you know just putting it off to to run off um because that's not necessary and that's wasting product and it's you know not as sustainable um so you will see an increased percentage when you when you use um your adjuvants or your um um your oils okay great thank you everyone good disc and I know we have a whole other part so I don't want to um take up too much time now we'll definitely have time at the end for more questions and questions on the intelligent sprayer but um disease Warning Systems I believe is what's up next Mark yes so this is a also part of the same project in which we did the intelligent sprayer we were looking at um a couple of disease Warning Systems uh uh both looking at them by themselves and also in combination with the intelligent sprayer technology to see how far we could um uh take the pesticide reduction so you may be familiar with Warning Systems they're using weather data to predict disease risk mostly weather data you can measure it in your orchard or you can use weather estimates from nearby weather stations and and in a minute Melanie's going to talk about the NEWA system which would be a little bit different than measuring It Yourself by yourself um and the uh the idea of The Warning Systems and they're based on Research is that you spray a fungicide or bactericide whichever is appropriate only when the disease risk is high so if the system tells you you have a high risk of of an outbreak then you're you're be able you're able to time your sprays more efficiently and perhaps save some sprays so uh I'm turning it over to Melanie now and uh talking a little bit about these uh weather stations and weather networks yeah so as as Mark mentioned you know these Warning Systems rely heavily on weather data they also you know incorporate the pathogen biology and the crop type but whether data is critical to the success of these these models and you can you know collect using a weather station the the data and input it by hand into the model or you know you can use the software or these platforms that you know will take that weather data in real time for you input it into the model and then give you an output and there are a few of these platforms available and the one that we work with here at Ohio State is NEWA which is the network for Environmental oh I always forget this the Network for Environmental and Weather Applications NEWA and um you can access this tool at newa.cornell.edu so it's hosted there and if you move on to the next slide um here in Ohio we started using the system in 2016 and there's a yearly subscription fee for it and that subscription fee varies depending on um whether or not you get a state subscription or individual Growers can also get a subscription so here in Ohio my fruit pathology program with support from the fruit marketing growers association and from the USDA and Heping Zhu we pay for that subscription so anybody in Ohio can access any of the weather stations that are connected to this system and and use utilize the the IPM tools that are on it this system supports two different um types of weather stations uh a rain-wise or an onset which are both the base price for them are both about the same it will also support other weather stations but you have to work with the new coordinator to make sure that the data that's being collected from that weather station is compatible with their um with their database and their software and and so in fact here in Ohio at our at our outline branches our research stations we converted our data had you know we worked with a software engineer who converted our data so that it was compatible and we did that using the new coordinator help and then once once you have your weather station set up and you can then request Hardware on boarding and you would do that through your state partner so right now um Iowa does not have um a subscription for the entire state but as a grower you uh you could you know get a weather station and set it up and you have the option of making your weather stations public as well so I don't think we have any producers in Ohio who haven't made theirs public so if you're close by you know you can make estimates and use their weather data to help you predict when you might want to spray depending on the disease or the insect pest that you're that you're looking at um we have I think 46 of weather stations now connected to NEWA um in our state and most of our large-scale Apple producers are are using um NEWA in some form of or another um if you want to advance the slide okay so there are several tools IPM tools available through NEWA and of course we're going to be focusing on diseases today and there are three disease models there that you can access for forecasting there's fire blight sooty blotch and flyspeck and apple scab there are also Apple thinning and irrigation models that you can utilize and then there are multiple insect pest models that that you can utilize our Growers here in Ohio use the fire blight Model a lot as well as the Apple scab and then they also take advantage of the Apple carbohydrate thinning model so they they use this this platform quite a bit uh next slide so for the risk assessment model for fire blight um this focuses on a biofix state or time at first open blossoms so if you just recall a little bit about Fire blight the primary infections occur during Bloom and the bacteria enter in um through the flower and then infect systemically so as soon as you have Bloom you have a risk for fire blight infections to occur and so that is why that is the biofix you can use cougarblight or MaryBlyt and the MaryBlyt in this case has been modified somewhat to be used as an epiphytic infection potential or EIP and so in this image on you can see on the right hand side are the risk levels um based on the EIP value and on the left side based on Cougar blight and the model for the EIP which is what we recommend here in Ohio it considers four different factors so the bloom date whether or not you have a history of fire blight in your orchard or in a nearby Orchard uh temperature for epiphytic growth and then the blossom wetting period and so it takes all this information um and as as well as your weather data and it provides an output and you can see the output here is color based which is really nice it makes it very easy you don't really have to pay attention to the numbers you can just look at the colors and then if you advance one you can see then it provides you with recommendations and you know working together with your state expansion extension Specialists or with your crop Consultants you can you know adjust your spray gram spray program accordingly here in Ohio our primary bactericide that we use is streptomycin although we do have streptomycin resistance in some of our Orchards and once we've identified resistance in an Orchard then we go ahead and make modifications to the recommendations using something such as kasugamycin so this is very nice that it provides this information based on your state too there's a link which I'm not showing but you can click on Ohio for instance and then it will link you to resources from the Ohio specialist which in this case is me okay next Slide the second one is the sooty blotch and fly speck and this model is based on um research that was done in New York and when Mark talks about the model he'll be talking about the Iowa model um which we used for our research but I wanted just to point out that NEWA uses the New York model it's based in Cornell so that makes sense um their biofix is 90 percent petal drop and in this case they're focusing on Leaf wetness duration or your LWD and predicted rain events and it also you input when your last fungicide application date is and then once you have an accumulation of 175 wetting hours that's predictive of an infection vent and would warrant a spray application and again it's color-coded here as you can see um so there will be green yellow or red so low medium or high risk and if you advance Mark you can see here that it gives you recommendations for spraying and they also provide recommendations based on a hundred gallon per acre or a product per 100 gallon uh for the fungicides to use so again this would have a link and it would link to Ohio or whichever State you were coordinating with um to get your recommendations from from that in terms of spray so that's just a very quick overview of um the two risk assessment models that we're focusing on for this project which is fire blight and sooty blotch and fly speck next slide is you Mark I think okay um as as Melanie said we tested sooty blotch and fly speck uh warning system but it was an Iowa version when we had developed in Iowa uh and uh and the MaryBlyt uh uh fireblight model that um that Melanie had had mentioned and this is Liv's uh data that I'm I'm talking about here um so how how does this work compared to the one Melanie talked about it's um in a sense it's a little bit simpler uh not better Just simpler um it's it it starts when you put on the first fungicide first cover fungicide spray then you start counting up hours of relative humidity greater than 90 percent after that and day by day you add up those numbers and when that total reaches 350 hours it's time to spray again once you start spraying again then you resume a regular calendar based timing for sprays following that so that that delay is only done once during the growing season and this is the paper this mostly at all paper is the research that we use to develop that that warning system in Iowa we did have three dry years as uh as Liv said and um we had um a lot of we sprayed a saved a lot of sprays for sooty blotch and fly speck for an average of four per year which is exceptional I think if he got back into a wetter cycle that might be more like two or three sprays per year but in a dry year you can you can certainly save more as far as the the fire blight and Maryblyt fire blight warning system um Melanie already described the inputs and so forth um we were able uh uh in Liv's work to to save one spray in 2021 uh uh one antibiotic spray um in in her plots well yeah so not antibody but fungicide uh sorry not not fungicide antibiotic um so just just looking at this as a whole um the the Disease Control on these sooty blotch and fly speck and uh and um then fire blight we're we're equivalent we had about the same incidents uh it was low um being dry here low incidence of both sooty blotch fly speck and um and Fire blight an equivalent to whether or not we use the warning system so although we were able to save sprays we did not sacrifice anything in terms of Disease Control just to wrap up this session um we talked initially first half hour about intelligent sprayer and then later about Warning Systems uh to to try to fix this these ideas both of these things contribute to saving pesticide sprays the intelligent sprayer technology saves the volume has to go on a given acre of Orchard because of the greater accuracy and less waste so we're saving volume per trip pesticide per trip and and all the other things expenses that go along with um with spraying Warning Systems disease Warning Systems on the other hand um save trips if if we're not putting on an insecticide at that particular time we don't have to make that spray trip at all so we're saving all those costs associated with the trip itself and the the spraying the the pesticide savings here would be in in the in the form of fungicides and antibiotics depending on the warning system that you're looking at so if we add up these two and we we put these Technologies together to see how they would do the Warning Systems with the intelligent sprayer and um what we ended up with was less volume per spray trip that's the intelligent sprayer and fewer spray trips that's the use of The Warning Systems but we yet to repeat we had an uh equivalent disease in Pest Control compared to Standard air blast and using a calendar-based uh timing rather than a warning system timing um the result we think we're completing our economic analysis here but it looks like the IPM would be considerably more cost effective by combining this technology uh and or or using them alone and uh and considerably less environmental risk because we're just putting on less pesticides and less less wastefully it comes the question and and um this this was related to a question that that a a listener um asked is how how low can we go with um with reducing these pesticides and um we when we combine the intelligent sprayer with Warning Systems uh we're we're looking at two uh spray reduction Technologies one with with um volume per acre reduction and The Warning Systems with um saving additional trips so each of those times we're reducing our our pesticide umbrella to protect the tree and and so the the the question how low can you go um will partially be answered uh by the um uh fine-tuning these Technologies or these these uh strategies to your own Orchard so variety location experience with the system with the intelligent sprayer uh one one learns how to use it effectively and likewise with the Warning Systems the the more you use it the more efficient um get so all these factors are going to go into how far that pesticide umbrella can can shrink just as a wrap up here um this is our project team and and Melanie and and I were the the state leads and me and Ohio in Iowa and she and Ohio and there's our email addresses if you want to contact us for anything uh Heping Zhu is the um the engineer uh the lead engineer behind the intelligent sprayer he's at the USDA ARS spray lab in Wooster Ohio um so he's actually a USDA employee with just a courtesy appointment to Ohio State uh we have the economist Wendong Zhang um and uh Nieyan Cheng was his graduate student they're both working together on the analysis of the economics on the project Liv Meyer that you've heard from and this um webinar and Bailey Miller was a former technician at um at Ohio State and Jose Gonzalez was the overall project coordinator based at in Iowa State so with that we can take any additional questions uh they can be on the um Warning Systems or intelligent sprayer or whatever else you have on your mind yes thank you guys so much so please type in your questions into that q&a at the bottom of the screen one I just kind of wanted to ask like between the intelligent sprayer and disease Warning Systems like if you if you're not using either one like which which one do you think you would start with first would you just start both at the same time which one might save you more and pesticide like where would you start as a grower well that's a good question and and I think it's a fair to say it depends and there's a number of factors in Melanie and Liv can can chime in here um I think that the potential to save pesticides is probably greater with the intelligent sprayer because you're saving substantial percentage every time you you put on that spray the barrier for some Growers will be the cost um that is it's a substantial investment to to go that way but again our economic analysis um to this point shows that it is can be repaid uh um you know in a reasonable amount of time but it depends on the orchard size for a larger Orchard there'll be economies of scale with that larger Orchard and um repayment will come more quickly the other thing about Warning Systems is they're cheaper to get into far cheaper to get into one could buy weather gear and And subscribe to NEWA in the case of Ohio it's free to subscribe um that so you can get into that sooner um it it will save spray trips and that that does save all the costs associated with that trip including the gasoline Machinery depreciation labor Etc um so again you're saving trips with the Warning Systems and you're saving volume with the intelligent sprayer so um which should you get in first um I think it's going to depend on the circumstances of your particular Orchard Enterprise um Etc I want to comment uh Melanie or Liv I I I think that you said it beautifully yeah ideally I would love for people to you know jump on board with the intelligent sprayer just because of the so much savings and reduced drift and reduced environmental impact and you know we've done for several years on multiple crops now and it's just really really a great IPM tool and I think for us in Ohio the next step is to see if we can work with the state to you know get some type of subsidy programs or environment you know programs that will help support purchasing one based on you know the environmental um uh the benefits to the environment by by using it I think uh Melanie if I'm correct um uh one of the federal programs has support for for this but I don't know whether it's directly applicable here or not yeah and it's not offered every year right I'm not sure some states have have started to you know provide subsidies for the intelligent sprayer um The Warning Systems they they do take a bit of your your time you know you need to be checking the weather data one thing I didn't say about NEWA is that it has a really nice app which I think is part of the reason why a lot of our Growers have jumped on board using it because they can be out in the field and just go to the app and and look and make decisions but you do have to be checking it you know every day or at least every other day and you know be ready to respond as well so it's not as convenient that way as just doing a calendar spray program for instance um that's a good point the convenience factor but I think it's fair to say that for both of these technology intelligent sprayer and Warning Systems there is a learning curve to get the good good at them and uh I I think you could uh ascribe to that too Liv because you know you you worked with it and intelligent sprayer directly and actually driving it up and down the roads for three years and um would you agree there's you know there you get better as you go and you understand it better yeah I was actually going to make a comment about that with adopting both systems um I don't think the learning curve is as steep you know um if you feel overwhelmed if we've been talking about this um with the intelligent sprayer yeah it's it's basically equivalent to getting a new application on your phone like what NEWA has and just kind of figuring out the ins and outs um right away of the tech and it's their customer service is also pretty good you know we've had to call them a couple of times for things but pretty manageable for the most part so and low maintenance you know even with all this technology you know it's low maintenance it only requires calibration once at the beginning which is nice you know ideally if you're using other sprayer technology you should be calibrating every time but you know that doesn't happen all the time but um with this one it's a a once and done per year the only thing that would add to that uh that I think we mentioned in our in our grower manual that we have available now on our website is um that um there's a I'm sorry like a little window isn't it live that that receives the laser Reflections and that has to be kept clean and that's something you want to wipe clean before you go out to spray each time um yeah and that's just as simple as using a cloth and a plastic cleaner to get in there so yeah kind of like your backup camera so the uh yeah the new uh beta like is that pretty much Nationwide um Can people kind of like download it now and start checking it out or do you have to kind of wait till the growing season no you can go to you can go to NEWA now and you know if there's a you know you can select any public weather station and look look at that that data um and you know it it provides all the weather data as well as the models um but you would have to you would have to go you know select a state on there and then go to that you know select a weather station within that state in order to play with it so if if you want to play around with it I would say go to Ohio and there's we have three of them in Wooster um you know click on one of them they're all public and you can see and it it retains the data from the day you set up the weather station if so you on board and so I can go back you know to 2016 for instance which is kind of nice you can go back and you know look at historical data and it presents it in a very nice way in nice graphs um we're on NEWA 3.0 now so it's much better to use than it was you know four
or five years ago there really have put a lot of work into having a nice interface there's a question on the uh on the chat are there any risks of fungicide resistance development because of less amount of fungicide applied with the intelligent sprayer that's a really good question um we haven't we haven't document Well we'd like to think that that's true you know we haven't documented any increased risk as long as you're at the effectiveness level the the minimum level at which the fungicide is effective and can can retain its Effectiveness between spray intervals then you should not have um additional or or any additional risk of fungicide development by fungicide resistance one thing to keep in mind is a lot of the spray savings most of the spray savings here is because uh what was formally drift in other words it missed the tree is now uh hitting the where you want it to go so you could consider that drift to be essentially wasted uh and and there's very much less drift when you're in the intelligent spray mode so um yeah I'll add to that that you know it's it's not actually reduced volume you know the same amount of volume is going on to the canopy it's that you have reduced waste and so if you think about fungicide resistance and how it works you possibly could be lowering your risk because you don't have that off-target drift and off-target drift often is contributing to resistance development in off-target microorganisms and then depending on you know how resistance moves around um that can that you know you have a reduction in horizontal movement so in terms of fire blight you have less off-target um bacteria being hit by your antibiotic for instance we did look at it in grapes um so we sampled um before and after for QoI or Strobilurin resistance we sample before and after each spray um throughout the season and we saw no no um difference in fact we saw no resistance development using a standard fungicide program for grade and you know that's uh those are a group of fungicides that are highly at risk for for fungicide development the QoIs yes so um yeah I think the uh the key is having that good coverage the kind of thing Liv was talking about if you've got if you have a good coverage on your target then you're you're well protected excellent well we're at about time um everyone so thank you so much for all the excellent webinar um if you're attending you will receive an email um when the video is available and and please share that with anyone who wasn't here um just to let you know our next Pest and progress webinar will be February 15th that will be 12 30 p.m Central 1:30 Eastern time um we're going to be talking about trapping and development of degree day models for Missouri Berry crops and we're going to have Clement Akotsen-Mensah from Lincoln University of Missouri and a couple of his collaborators um talking about that so hopefully we will see you all in a in a month so thank you everyone thank you
2023-01-27 01:17
