Agri Spray Drones founder and CEO Taylor Moreland offered his input on Dr. Steve Li's drone drift reducing agent (DRA) webinar on May 15, 2024.
Dr. Li shared these notes:
The droplet size and DRA rate selection in this training is toward typical row crop applications. The considerations for specialty crops, pasture, rangeland and forestry will be different. For example, auxin herbicides applied over pasture, rangeland and forest site will not easily lose efficacy with bigger droplets and reduced # of droplets compared to row crop applications. Big droplets will reduce drift and evaporation during the free fall when flying higher off the ground (20-30 ft vs 10 ft over row crops).
The DRA evaluation in this training was 100% conducted with rotary atomizer. The optimal rate for hydraulic flat fan nozzles will likely be different. The other concern is drone with hydraulic nozzles frequently struggle to spray thick tank mix with higher viscosity. This is particularly true at low GPA (2-3) when multiple products are mixed in the tank. Adding DRA in this case may aggravate the problem and possibly making the tank mix unsprayable.
This training focused on the deposition aid function of the DRAs. Drift reduction provided by DRAs still require more field testing and will be discussed in future training. Current data suggests that deposition aid and drift reduction may require different DRA rates. This perspective will be updated with more data and information available.
Comparing the % of coverage of 2 and 3 GPA treatments together is not an apple-to-apple comparison, I get it. But it does show the value of why operators should consider spending more time to spray more volume because job quality is no doubt higher. This is also likely to be the mitigation method too if # of droplets was reduced too much by higher rate of DRA at 2 GPA.
The graphs used to demonstrate droplet size spectrum has volume on y axis which indicates volume delivered by different size of droplets. For example, if more VMD 200 um droplets were detected on water sensitive paper, the bar representing 200 um size will be higher because more spray volume was delivered by this droplet size. A similar graph can also be made using # of droplets detected on Y axis. I didn’t explain this very clearly in the training because of my slow brain speed at night and want to clarify it a little more here.
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