5-11 FB Improving Efficacy

 Improving efficacy and reducing pesticide application rates means lower costs for growers - and improved environmental safety for orchard workers as well as consumers. Currently, to protect an orchard from a pest outbreak, oftentimes a worker must drive a tractor hauling a sprayer up and down between rows of trees. But there are several inefficiencies in this scenario, one of which

is that the orchard manager simply may not have enough equipment to cover a large orchard in a timely manner. Another is that weather such as lots of rain or snow prohibits getting into the orchard.

Now, imagine a  permanent misting system embedded into the trellis’s of an orchard where water and chemicals can be delivered efficiently and without regard to outside factors.. Matt Grieshop is an entomologist working on such a project  “ We think we can do a much more efficient job so that we can get away with less active ingredient. We can spray under conditions that would normally preclude someone from spraying. When folks are out trying to get let us say scab materials on, sometimes they can’t because they have had so much rain and snow melt that their tractors sink up to the axles. Well of course if you have the system in the orchard, you don’t have to take a tractor through the system so you can get your spray on in a timely fashion.” And of course this system does include just plain irrigating.