Is Your Spray Hitting the Target? | Spray Tech Webinar 1 | Villa Crop Protection | Voltan Senekal

Are you getting the most out of your spray application, or is valuable product being lost before it reaches the target?

In this first Spray Technology Webinar, Voltan Senekal, National Marketing Manager at Villa Crop Protection, takes you through the science and real-world realities of spray application. From nozzle selection to droplet behaviour, drift risk and penetration into the canopy.

This practical, data-driven session draws on insights from global research and field demonstrations, helping producers and advisors make better decisions to reduce spray losses, improve efficacy and protect return on investment.

You’ll learn:
• What really happens to spray droplets between the nozzle and the plant
• Why nozzle choice, pressure and droplet size matter
• How environmental factors increase application risk
• How better spray technology leads to better coverage, retention and control.

This is Webinar 1 in a Spray Technology series.

More webinars, including the role of adjuvants and spray retention, presented by Dr Brian de Villiers, are coming soon. Details to follow.

Trusted by farmers for over three decades, Villa Crop Protection continues to invest in research-driven solutions to help growers spray smarter and farm more efficiently.

👉 Find any Villa Product on our Website: https://www.villacrop.co.za 

👉 Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/a66wXR6zh-s  

Transcript

I think I'm going to start. It is 3:30. I just want to say welcome to everybody on this call and on this webinar. It is really interesting to see the many faces and the many places. One of the reasons why I will be presenting in English this afternoon is, we've got a lot of Zambian friends of ours, farmers farming in Zambia that dialed in.

Now, today's webinar originally started off as a webinar for them. And we thought, why lose the opportunity just to brush up on some of the concepts that a lot of you are already familiar with. It might be old news to a lot of you, but no harm doing just a little brush up. Also on this call, And, I'm very glad there are some of our Admin and support colleagues of ours at Villa also on this call. And I really hope you find it interesting that we have to share it with you today.

There is around 120 delegates, that have, indicated that they, will join us. So very good. Interest. I think it's important topics that we are talking about. My co-presenter, Doctor Brian de Villiers, unfortunately cannot be here today. We are busy with a series of three webinars around adjuvants and application technology and the importance of that. So, Doctor Brian, you will be in the next session, do the adjuvants and all the things that are important for what's happening in the tank, in the tank mix, as well as on the targets?

And today I will be talking what happens to that spray droplet, that expensive chemistry that you are trying to get onto target? And I really hope you will find it insightful. And this is my part I do want to mention. And there on the screen is, Doctor Marius Ras. Some of you do know him, doctor Marius Ras did his PhD on application technology, and, I mean, he has, authored thich manuals on application technology. Way more detail that I can share with you today. And, Marius Ras, doctor Marius Ras is an independent consultant, but, go and look him up, RAS Consult. And, I if you are in doubt or need some technical assistance, in depth assistance, we will definitely be available. Doctor Marius Ras as well.

We are going to talk today. Very broad. Unfortunately, we do not have enough time to really immerse ourselves into this, into this subject. There's a lot of detail that we can still add, but unfortunately, time doesn't allow allow this for us. There might be some, interesting party, some delegates that's, looking for information on orchard application. This one is a very much generic application, maybe a bit more lenient towards, ground application, but some of the principles are exactly the same.

And in future we will do a dedicated orchard application session and everything that goes around with that. That's it. Let us let us start off let us start off achievements in the tank, in the air and on the target. Today, we're talking about what happens as I said, to that expensive chemistry, in the air between the nozzle and before it hits the target.

Maybe for some new people, just a little bit of reference from where the crop protection comes from. The of crop protection currently, is owned by land O'Lakes. Land O'Lakes is a fortune 200 company in the US. And I say companies actually co op and, it, it consists of 320 dairy farmers started from 1921. So going on 105 years already, then the lakes have three business units.

First is Purian and that's the animal feed one. Then Winfield United, which are the AG inputs and services. And this is where the Villa Crop Protection resides in within that business unit. They are also a Canadian business unit, a Mexican business unit and a Brazilian business unit. And then there is the dairy products land O'Lakes unit within the bigger holding company.

Now, Villa started off in 1989, and maybe there's quite a few of you that haven't even been born yet. And, this was the date of birth of this whole company. Foods. Until where we all today. It got its name. Maybe it's christening. I don't know, in 1998 as Villa crop protection. There you can see the old logo and, fond memories around that.

And. Yeah, today. No, not today, 20,15 was a big, mark, a big event in Villa's evolution. And in the last growth, land O'Lakes became the majority shareholder in 2015. So going on 11 years already, lots of other highlights, on this timeline that we didn't include just a little bit of context of one way Villa is there, that's been here a long, long time.

Over 600 product registrations. We are the biggest, largest holder of product registrations in South Africa. And, you know, we do around 900 plus research and development trials. And these are statistical replicated research and development trials. These are not the look sees and the demos and and the and that kind of trials. So we invest heavily in these trials research and development.

The villa unit within Winfield united around 990 employees. We have various other units, business units in the bigger Winfield holding company, one of them, METOS that you can see down here. We are already over 500 weather stations within that business of meters. Now, our ambitions are big. The ambitions are to have a weather station and start building weather history or climate history on each and every fall.

That's our ambition with that business, our manufacturing capabilities, 6,000,000l per annum is our capability to formulate locally in Olifantsfontein, Joburg, between Johannesburg or Pretoria. And we can handle 12 million imported products, every year. So quite the capacity and heavily invested to make sure that, there is enough products and that, the qualities they.

Let's get to what we are here today. Application risk, application risk as many factors. Some of them you have control over a lot of them you do not have control over temperature and humidity. Yes, you can maybe manage it to an extent, but, yeah. If it's too hot when it starts raining, whatever. This is stuff that we cannot control.

Wind speed and wind direction, the landscape. These are all variables that are difficult to manage. Close to. Things that are manageable would be the travel speed, making sure that you release height, within the specifications, nozzle spacing, type of nozzle. Pressure pump, the servicing of your pump, the calibration, all of those things, things that you have control over.

And it is very important that this is the basis and the foundation of mitigating risk during application. Get that right. So many times I see, growers, they invest heavily in the planters and all kinds of other equipment. And, you know, the sprayer gets pulled out 2 or 3 times a season. It looks like a chicken group. And they, they do not really care about that is an important part of farming successfully.

So there are many factors that we need to mitigate. Let's start with a couple of basics again. Once again, there might be some people that, find this, this information new to them here on the left hand side is and I'm going to use, the manufacturer TEEJET, as examples. There are many other manufacturers, but I think, TEEJET as a nozzle manufacturer is relatively well known.

Yes, a yellow nozzle. And there it's got the designation XR that stands for extended range. And then there's a code. Yeah 110 02 VP. That 110 is the degrees of the spray button. You might get an 80 which has a narrow spray button. And the 02 tells you it delivers 0.02 US gallons per minute.

At 43.2, psi which is roughly around three bar. That's the speed. This VP only stands for the type of material that this is manufactured on. So there isn't oh 110 0.02 gallons per minute delivery. You get a blue one. Probably see a lot of them still on places. That's X or the extended right range. 110 03 for 0.03 gallons US gallons per minute.

And then the red one is 110 04, delivering 0.04 gallons per minute at around three bar. VP has gone to materials manufactured. You see a VK, and the VS is probably for that stainless steel little tip in the these steps or regional old technology. I doubt if there are some of these on booms and on sprayers anymore.

If they are, get rid of them. Most definitely. I'm going to show you, what these old ones are costing. Sometimes I do get to places and you see all kinds of colors. It looks like a Christmas tree. And, and then they wonder, why are we not getting efficacy on application? There was a technological improvement on this, all the ones many years ago.

And that is called the the air induction nozzle. Going to go to the next screen. Use this one. Yes. The old XR 11004 and you can see on the AIXR 11004, it's got a much longer body. The reason for that is this orifice of a, that excessive venturi system.

As the spray comes out of the nozzle, it sucks in air. It gets, mixed inside this chamber with the spray mix, and you get a more homogenous size droplet that are coming out. And I'm going to physically show you the data difference between the old XR as well as the AIXR. Now, the air induction, technology is applicable to many other nozzle types.

You've got the TT’s, the twin turbos, lots of different ones. This larger body indicates that there is a chamber for mixing the a just homogenizing the droplet size. The, the technology is the same despite the amount of orifices on top. Like when you get a twin turbo or whatever. Delivery's exactly the same. It's a zero for.

There's a concept that I would like to share with you which, creates some confusion, especially if you go and, have a look at nozzle selection restart, looking at the calibration of your sprayer, deciding on what type of nozzle you need, all of them, all designated with a VMD. That's the the volume mean diameter.

Now the volume mean diameter is not the average size of the droplet. And, I'm going to show you exactly why that is not the case. If we take this spray pattern and we can literally freeze it in time, take each and every drop and then take them out from small all the way to large from the get that, get that spectrum of droplets we take then 2 containers of equal volume, and then we start filling from the small one into the first container.

We start filling, filling, filling all the way. The first container, remember, equal volume. We fill them up all the way to today. As soon as that first container, two liters is full, the next droplet in the road that needs to go in there, that is your VMD the volume mean diameter. And as you can see with this picture, way less droplets go into the second equal volume container than in the first.

And that's why I say it is not the average size. It's a volume mean diameter that that is involved. So the first 50% of your spray volume might have X amount, mostly the biggest amount of droplets because of size. And the second 50% volume of your spray pattern might have less droplets because they are simply bigger. All right.

This for uses in this case, just as an example, 300 micron droplet would be the VMD of this nozzle that created this spray pattern. You need data to understand what happens with droplets. With our colleagues in the USA we have access to the innovation center. In Minnesota, the number falls in Minnesota. I've had the privilege to have visited this facility quite a few times, and every time I'm so impressed when I get there to be able to see the technology and, the resources, that our colleagues have and, out of this place, this come a lot of data and insights to what happens with spray patterns inside the Innovation Center, amongst a lot of other things that they are doing.

There is this spray analytical system. You can see there at the top staff of the chamber. So what what we do in in this spray analytical system, in this spray analysis system, we can simulate different environmental conditions, low humidity, high temperature, wind, whatever we want to simulate, we can simulate in this chamber.

We can take a nozzle and simulate nozzles on element for either application or land application, like different nozzles. Have a look at what they performance. Oh. How does the, droplet spectrum look like. And then more importantly, we add chemistry to these nozzles to see what the influence is on droplet size. It is important to understand that when you decide on a nozzle and the type of VMD that you are looking for, either that calibration or rather that designation of that nozzle is with water, that technical spec is with water.

None of us spray water. The moment that you put chemistry in, it changes that whole spectrum of a droplet. Some chemistry, besides insecticides, fungicides, PGR doesn't matter. It's based on the type of formulation B the EC, SL, SC, all of them have a different influence on the droplets and on the droplet size. Some bulb droplets bigger, some both droplets smaller collapse droplets smaller.

Now one of the most well known, active ingredients, in agriculture is, glyphosate, obviously glyphosate. An interesting enough glyphosate or what is one of those formulations and SL formulation that actually makes droplets smaller. I'm going to run through some numbers and, yeah, just bear with me. There's a couple of, busy graphs, but, we're going to get to some some nice pictures if I take the label, I talked about glyphosate as a, as a reference as a, as an example.

This, this this screenshot comes from a very well well-known glyphosate supply, glyphosate products. And on the label, it says droplet size, a droplet spectrum with a VMD of 300 to 400 microns is recommended. So keep keep that in mind. 300 to 400 microns is recommended. Limits the production of fine droplets less than 150 microns.

high drift and evaporation potential to a minimum this hundred and 50 microns. The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, has designated that size of a droplet as high just with evaporation potential. It is a risky size, the EU as a smaller one, I think they around 120 or 125 micron they deem as I drift potential or evaporation potential design.

Right. Remember that 150. This is on the label of one of the glyphosate suppliers. We took that. We took this yucky blue one. For the moment, let's take this one as the example. I put it in. We put it in the sprayer system in the spray analytical system. And, there it is. It's a zero hundred and 110 03, We pushed it to the spec of 43.5 psi, roughly around three bars of pressure. We added, roundup max in this instance. And, we had a look at what's going to happen with this spray pattern. Here is the spray pattern. There it goes. From small droplets. This is the size of the droplets on this axis.

And this is the density, small amount of droplets in that spectrum coming out of that nozzle. You're goes. You see this bell curve? The VMD for this one is 174 microns. They're drawing that line. All right. That's the VMD. Let's go and have a look at the 150 micron lines. Great line over there. If you go and have a look at this spray pattern, that surface area on this bell curve amounts to 47% of the spray volume.

That is according to that label, 47% is risk sized droplets coming out of this one. Nice. This is on the, on the actual pressure. We hope that we take it for granted that the pump is fine. Nobody's over pressuring. Imagine your operator is increasing pressure or whatever. This is ideal circumstances according to calibration. Now, this, there is another this another line here, 105 and you can five micron, 105 micron droplet is designated as never going to be able to hit target.

It is too small. It gets suspended in the atmosphere and the evaporation rate is just too high. If we draw the hundred and five micron, line in on this graph, that surface area of the day would amount to 20%. So with this nozzle, and I really hope they all know now that is still going within 03 nozzle applying anything.

This is not the self-propelled ones. They definitely have bigger, bigger nozzles 07, 08, 09’s even and they are running away. I have pressures for that particular nozzles, but I really hope there's nobody using this anymore. If you look at this graph with that nozzle, 47% of your, of your sprayed back here is under under 20% is not going to find this target two liters of glyphosate and you take 20% away there.

That's like 400ml, that you take away. You can physically throw away 400ml, concentrated glyphosate. Because of this pattern. It's not going to go with these two. Go. All right. So yeah 20% wasted. Let's go to another graph and a bit more visual on this I'm bringing in that that bigger better nozzle. And I'm skipping straight to the hundred and 110 04 in this comparison, this is high speed photography also coming out of the spray analytical system at the Innovation Center.

And if you go and have a look at that video on top, you can see the that's adjustable. So that's 150 microns. And going smaller over there drifting away while it's hanging around. It's evaporating. If it evaporates to around 50 to 100 microns, if it hits, a warm, surface like a leaf or whatever, that it's going to instantly evaporate.

So definitely not a good spray bet. There. You can see it. I'm going to show you some other, I speak photography on this as well. So I'm going to have a look at a good nozzle spec 110 04. Yeah. Down at the bottom. So much less drift, way less small particles, but they still are the right.

So equipment can take you. Only that for just the comparison between these two to demonstrate some, some other factors that we learned out of this, big wind tunnel, the spray analytical system. And, my apologies for, for this, this busy slide. It's kind of a photo, so I couldn't hide some of this stuff. Anyway, just bear with me.

I'm going to take you from a side. We take that same nozzle that hundred and 110 03. We plugged it in. We created 29°C, 80% relative humidity, generated to 16km/h wind in that wind tunnel. I don't know about the Zambian guys. I know it's hot today. Places where I come from. I'm from the Western Transvaal, which is through, going to LRA and Schweizer 29 with 80% relative humidity.

I don't know when that that happens. That's this, this ideal, ideal circumstances 9:00 in the morning, we're running 20% humidity, 35 plus. And even down in the Cape. The on the West coast, a lot of places don't get very, very hot quickly. Very dry. So this is this is nice. Ideal circumstances. What do we see out of this?

29°C, 80% relative humidity, 16 hour, 16 kilometer output. When if we put the boom at 45cm above the target. I've seen some labels talk about 50cm above target. If we put it 45cm above target, and we measure the 300, the 200 and the 300 micron droplet sizes, we find that it takes 29 seconds for it to evaporate to, around 150 microns and less.

This 63cm is the terminal velocity, the distance to terminal velocity, terminal velocity, meaning that droplets coming out of that nozzle is directional with intent, with momentum of the 63cm it has lost terminal velocity. And it is there. Environmental, conditions start having a big influence on what happens with this droplet. Remember, with 45cm, above the canopy, with that nozzle, 63cm.

Terminal velocity that means around 22. Yeah, around 22cm. Canopy penetration where terminal velocity stops. I'm comfortable with that. Not not too much of a problem. If you go and look at the 150 micron, remember that's a red line. It takes 12 seconds for that 250 micron to evaporate under that 100, 105 limits. Its terminal velocity is 43cm.

We're doing 45 and 43cm. Two centimeters above the canopy. Terminal velocity is gone. All funny things start happening like just 1.4m. It starts drifting. And while it's drifting, remember the environment's having that influence on it. It's evaporating. It's blowing all over the place. Now, I'm going to come back to the drift. I'm going to come back to zero.

Let's go and have a look at that 100 micron sized droplet. Seven seconds for it to lose. It's, its size going up to 15 microns. This is suspension, guys. The atmosphere is starting to suspend this droplet between 100 and 50 micron. Its terminal velocity is 22cm. That's halfway to the top of the canopy. The drift on this 100 micron is 5.3m off target.

Remember, that's movement of 5.3m within a 45 centimeter band. That's a lot of just going sideways. The 150 micron is 1.4m. I've got the guys in there tell me, at least it's learning on the, on the next row. It might land there. But what happens if you are spraying a contact, contact probe, let's say from oxygen or a paraquat or who fossilized or something like that.

And it doesn't go down to deeper, canopy penetration. All right. So guys, is now I'm not too worried about it or spraying a systemic product. All right. Is that product systemic upwards. Because if that lands on the top of the canopy is not going down, or if you are lucky, it might go down. But what happens if I've got 2 or 3 types of products insecticide, fungicide, and maybe, a post emergent herbicide in this whole mix, different, formulations and different modes of action with upward systemic downstream content.

If you don't get good coverage top to bottom in the canopy, you are not winning or achieving what you are trying to do. There is a lot of money going lost between the in this 45cm due to a bad nozzle selection, and I want to bring back to equipment of bad equipment. That's what we saw on this picture.

I'm going to show you the short video. Unfortunately with the trial that we did was with 110 02, the AIXR 110 02 and 110, XR one year. This is one that I was physically, presented that we did up in the Northern Cape, there in that irrigation areas in Orania.

And, what we did on this side of the boom, we put this, AIXR on nozzles and on that part of the boom, we left that, that 110 XR in it, and we wanted to show the farmer what's the difference is by just changing your nozzle, you will see. Look at these. Lines in the sand that I drew.

There is another one. You see, when I start the video just now, that is the what I call the weight footprint under the boom. And you will see on the XR is a way bigger weight footprint created under the boom than this one. Remember delivery is the same. So it's 02 It's an 02 delivery. It's the same.

So this is just this is small particles going off target. And when this, this spray dries you can always see drying from here. Why the smaller ones just did the furthest. And they are the first one to start evaporating on this. All right, let's, let's have a look here. You can, you can, you can see that spray traveling there.

You can just see it there. And I mean, this is powerful. This is powerful to go and show somebody what is happening. There is no penetration. Cannot be penetration on this side. Yeah. You are getting depth penetration just going to show it again. Maybe there's some guys on cell phones looking at this. You can clearly, clearly see what's what's happening there.

All right. And then we were wondering, why am I not getting efficacy? Look at that. Boom. Right. Yeah. Interesting. Look at that. Boom. Right. And the difference in that weight footprint just on that boom boom. Right, right. Herbicide alone. You're getting about around 20% if you have, a good nozzle in this case, screw out that one.

Put in this one on the smaller sprayers, you get a 4.3% draftable versus a 20% of the GSM high speed photography. I'm just going to run quickly through these. A bit of a repeat. It's always nice for me to visually see this. All right. This is a busy graph. I'm going to skip this one and two three slides on.

We're going to revisit. This one is just to show again the XR RoundUp Powmax 20% driftables, AIXR RoundUp Powmax 4.3% driftables. There it is I'm going to come back to come back to this graph later. So we have we have physically just quickly touched on just nozzles. We take it that your equipment is up to standard.

You understand what needs to be done with nozzle selection. All of that is right. How do we mitigate the factors that we do not have control over, which is the formulations that go the time of day that we are applying those environmental conditions that I spoke about. This is where adjuvants start playing the role. After you have looked at your equipment.

Now, the adjuvant in this space that's between the nozzle and the target is just in deposition agents. Now everybody are familiar with them. They've been they've been around since whatever. But they are different categories of them. And they are newer technologies. The older technologies were the Guar and the polyacrylamide. And these and the Lecithins even down here, they were in essence, just viscosity increases.

And if you didn't get your dosage right, you would have, sticky, snotty stuff coming out of the spray, nozzles. Dosage dependent. They are not very, mixed in with, with certain, formulations, especially with some of the more refined formulations that we require today. A lot of the old nausea or nasty chemistry that we used to you've use in the, in the formulations help to mitigate these products, these old technology, products help mitigate the compatibility and efficacy, you know, xylene and, there's a lot of these stuff in the formulations that we do not use, anymore.

So Guar, polyacrylamide Lecithin, they are they are old technologies. Viscosity increases thickness. The inverted emulsions were the next generation of, better constructed, better formulated drift and deposition agents. Good performance. The inverted emulsions, finicky, also, depending on what type of chemistry you use, but relatively easy to use. If you understand which which needs to go where, performance wise, did very good.

Now, the sweet spot between the inverted emulsions, the oil emulsions and, in this case, and this is, the product that we brought, from the USA about, ten years ago, is interlock and it is an oil, emulsion. It consists of two vegetable oils. But what makes it unique is the two oils. Blending is very particular, and the chain length of those two oils is very important.

So seeing the the source of those oils, those vegetable oils was, a few years battle for the University of Minnesota, which holds the patents on interlock for them to be able to find the right chain length of both these oils so that they can be combined. It's easy to put two oils together, but how do they perform when they are sheared?

When they are stressed within pumping systems going through nozzles, what's that shear factor breaking this emulsion? Everybody knows how to make mayonnaise. It's easy to make mayonnaise out of an oil emulsion. So preventing making mayonnaise out of oil emulsions is a challenge. And then how does this go with chemistry? And how does this go with chemistry different than the inverted emulsion solicitors or the glass?

One of the patented attributes of interlock, specifically of the oil emulsions, are that it bolts in the spray pattern. It bolts small droplets bigger without making big droplets already in the system already in the spray pattern also begin. So it tightens up that, that small tail in that, in that in the drawer off. If you go and have a look at the graph on the left hand side, those small ducks it in closer to the VMD without moving the bell curve in total, or the right leg of that bell curve.

And this is where the patented technology lies with interlock. And I'm going to prove it with, data from that spray analytical system. So interlocking this oil emulsion brings data deposition decreases the drift and the effect is deeper dip penetration in the canopy is a busy graph. It's got some other stuff have on it as well. Sorry for repeating myself.

Let's take it from the top. Here's an XR 110 03. That's that's the one. That's how it looks like. If we take and we add interlock to that bad, not good nozzle, you can see it already cleans it up very very well. Still trustable. Same. Let's go and look at the numbers. And what that one. Gold.

It is this one going up there is my rating. There it is. Yes, 105. That surface area constitutes 20% adding interlock. There it is. It brings it down to 9.5. That's how 9.5 just looks like. So on the green one here it is 105. That area there is 9.5. Let's take a good nozzle. The AIXR, there it is.

Put in RoundUp PowMax. You can see way better pattern thatt the XR. That's it. Magenta one year those surface area over there 4.3. Cleaning up this spray. Batting with interlock. There it is. You can see that over there is my pointer. And that is this blue one coming to only 1.3% driftables on this spray pattern. Now I mentioned it takes small droplets and make it bigger without making big droplets bigger.

We don't want to shift this bell curve that way on the spectrum. That's what the guas and those thickeners do. But evolution is, take that gold one over here is going to now say, I lost my point. Just a move. There it is. You can see it started off here. And that green line, the one with the interlock, they all started off on the on these walls.

There they go, there they go, there they go. Look here they both land on the bigger ones. So this is without the interlock on that bad nozzle. And this is with the interlock on that. Bad nozzle. But your small on this with the interlock. And the same for the I saw. Here it is landing. They're starting off very similar list there from the hundred and five but landing very similar on this.

The large droplet spectrum. And this is what is unique about this particular adjuvants that we are using. Right. They just run that quickly for somebody to go and see it's going to run for two three seconds. All right. This is very powerful to to see these variations in these differences. When you're on the farm and on the farm and physically showing on your boom sprayer or whatever, how that physically looks like, and I hope we can get the opportunity to do that soon.

I'm especially talking to the Zambian guys. The coal, I'm flying out to you guys on Monday, and, we'll be visiting it up in the north. Not going to be able to visit everybody, but, hope to be working my way through the day with, with the team in the near future. XR nozzle, just the high speed one.

there again, XR plus interlock air induction one with interlock. You've seen this. Yeah visually very strong. Let us keep that one. This is a this is a nice, interesting, interesting demo that we did the one day at, one of our former days, this climber, this this picture. This is this is stock footage. This is not one of our guys.

But the principle is the same. What we did. Backpack sprayer. These electric backpack sprayers. So on that, on that lance, it's an extended lance, with a manifold, we put on the the old XR nozzles to XR nozzles on that side, and the AIXR nozzles on that side. And, what we did is 50cm above, above the canopy.

We added a little string there just to say that you've got your eye in on. Now, we to touch, you know, to keep that distance done. Create, a boom swing because, you don't want variability on this. And, then we put on the top of the canopy, we put, water sensitive papers around 50cm and then 80cm from the boom inside the canopy, we put down some more water sensitive papers and we added, look at how this water sensitive pipe papers

Look, under the circumstances, with the AIXR, and how do they look with the XR’s. All right. Yes. Here we go. Collect it. Collected the papers. What is in the papers? 50cm, 110. Now for the first. The first run. Just water. We want to see just how these nozzles perform. Just with water. Right. Let's go and have a look at the XR, top of the canopy.

That doesn't look like bad coverage. I've seen guys measure the position with his cell phone screens. Just just swipe it under the sprayer. And. Yeah, pretty much looks like then I think if you use your imagination and you say, there's probably 30, 40, droplets per square centimeter, like some of the labels say pretty, pretty good coverage, I would say if I don't have another comparison.

So, yeah, just for the moment, have a look at that one. I would say not too bad. 80cm. Let's go and have a look at, the depth the penetration. How much got the look at that paper. Look at that paper. Very well. You will you will see there is definitely less deposition then on the top.

Relatively good surface coverage, relatively good. It's all over the place. Not blotchy or anything, but, I don't know, I would say double digits. Lace coverage, 80cm deep. That's 30cm from the top to the bottom of that. All right. Good nozzle on the same boom right next to it. Oh. Now things starts, to bug you in the eye.

That's it. I saw plain water. No additives yet. 50cm. Let's go and look at 80cm. Good coverage. Good coverage. Even, on the on the on the 80cm. Way better than 50 on the saw. All right. Now we've done that. Run with water. Stop. Fill it up. Put in some interlock. Run it back again. Same sequence, same thing.

Definitely better coverage, better droplet deposition with the XR, with the interlock. The end without 80cm. Be penetration. Definitely better than the right good nozzle. In this case, the better choice. Wow, you didn't know what you didn't know a moment you do this kind of comparison, you really see the difference between good deposition, bad deposition. You start answering questions on why am I battling?

Why am I battling to control my targets? Why are we developing resistance? Because we are under dosing. And, this this was quite a now I know up, maybe get an opportunity to, to physically redo this. And if on the day, if we meet up, in future very powerful, very powerful. So something similar, they, we usually do not have a issue to, to, to hit the canopy on top.

This is an aerial application. An example of how most aerial applications look like. Coverage on the top. Not a problem. Coverage in the middle start losing it on the bottom. Not good coverage. Imagine the aerial application that you do here is for something like red spider mite, in your corn, and the contractor, the airtractor is only coming around 11:00 and they are at 11 with the heat in the Free State.

Whether there's no red spider mite over here anymore, they've all migrated down to where it is cooler. Now you're getting not even half those is totally under dosing laid down yet. And then a couple of days later, five days later, you call the contractor, because the spray didn't work, you contact the supplier. Red spider mite is back.

What's happening? It is because you're not getting good coverage. This one was, and was a interlocked, trial that we did top, middle, bottom. So you can see it going down, but the amount of coverage way, way better then, then without way better than without, so depth penetration is extremely important. Again, where is your target?

Are you working with that upward downhill systemic contact? Contact product. Very important. Get that deep penetration coverage from the top to the bottom. Let me just check. How are we doing on time? I think we're doing well, probably about another 15 minutes. Guys, be with me. This was a case study. Actually, quite a few years ago.

It was a potato farmer. They up in the Limpopo and in, Petersburg, aggravated phone call. Come and sort this out. I sprayed aphids. Yeah. The chemistry doesn't work. Come on. Sorted out. Got the, the guy sprayed cyromazine, and, Yeah, it was it was definitely. No, no control started working through the through the equipment, having a look at the equipment.

The guy was quite aggravated me. Nothing wrong with his equipment. His doing application in of always, you know, goes and, yeah, he's got the sock, sock applicator, the sock sprayer. The best there is with regard to coverage. All right. It's fine. Got him convinced. Let's put out some water sensitive papers and, let's go and have a look at the deposition.

I've put off the sound because, know it was an aggravated farmer, and he was speaking in single syllable, so I'm not going to share that with you. Just going to run quietly through this video. But we did put in water and run it over the potatoes. We add water sensitive papers on the top of the canopy, the middle of the canopy in the bottom.

And you would agree with me how we can that difference be on that size of a plant? But, interesting enough, we'll show you just now. So this was just water running up all the way to the top of the buffet there at the top of the buffet. Turned around and it's, added into the mixed it up came down same, just on the other side, obviously with some new water sensitive papers top of the canopy.

Bottom of the canopy, middle of a canopy, bottom of the canopy. And this was, this was one of the papers. This was water going up. No issue spraying the top of the canopy. But what was quite significant, even on that height of a potato, plant, there was a significant difference in the deposition that happened there, and it wasn't offset.

We placed this in the rows so that it had full exposure. There wasn't, canopy or coverage between the top of the bottom leaves or in any way. I mean, it's obvious you need to go and have a look at what's happening in the road, how deep it goes. And you can see excellent coverage on top.

If this was a downward systemic product, no problem. But you know it is not down. It's systemic. It's upwards systemic and contact. All right. At the top of the pivot added the interlock. And this was a whole different picture whole different picture on the spray pattern. The deposition. Very interesting. Very nice one. Yeah. To keep the to keep the business and the friendship.

Yeah. We did we did help the guy out. This is this is one, just outside of Bloemfontein. And, the guy with his highboy sprayer, self-propelled sprayer. He was spraying a very expensive, fungicide. Ran around seven, 800 bucks per ha, for alternaria. And a couple of other things. pyraclostrobin and, yeah, another thing in, you know, what the what what I'm alluding to. And, yeah, he had problems. Control, the the, the infestation. So what we did, just had a normal water run going down, and, what is this by this up in the top of the canopy? In the bottom again.

I'll show you just now, just some, let me just way, Hang on, hang on, hang on. Let me run it. There we are. All right, so there it goes., the sprayer in these rows. We've got the water sensitive papers packed out, This is water. I don't know what was previously in that sprayer. Wasn't to worried.

It was an intern that I used to do the video, and there it goes. All right. Yeah, in the foreground. The dead boy. Anyway, there you can, in the foreground, you can see the water sensitive paper out there. He comes right on the top. And then further down in the canopy is another one. And you can, you can you can already see the difference in coverage.

Right. Collect collected. Then this was the control. It was a top that was in the bottom. Top and the bottom. This was with interlock at a top bottom top bottom. So do that. Comparisons with those and do this comparison with those. And you can see the difference and you can see the difference. Just another short visual. That's on the drift.

Very obvious to you, to see what's happening then it's visually strong. You can you can see it. Right. I'm nearly done. Get it done. We get sprayer systems, that's got the, in this particular one that I'm going to show you now, it was case pages with aim command on it. And one of the reasons why the guys put on aim command, on the booms are not just for lower volume application, but, for that droplet size.

Regulation with a mechanical way to do it. It's, these pulses for the, for, for those if you did not familiar with it's these pulsing of the spray coming out, generating a much more, even spray pattern with regard to, droplet size for this particular farmer. Then was Schweizer Reyneke, He farms around 11, 12,000 acres.

And, this was early days of, presenting, introducing interlock into the market. So my colleague Todd Caldwell, he's from Minnesota. Todd. Tom, I, good friends. You won't mind me saying this. He's pink like a Vienna coming out of Minnesota and this was like, early January in, in, Schweizer Reyneke,

So the farmer told us, all right, let's go and do it in. The field was about a kilometer, two kilometers from from the homestead. There was an open field, that wasn't planted. And he said he wanted to see. Pulls up these two by traits with which he was very proud of. And, he said, all right, this is going to be the test ad interlock on the one and none on the other.

He satisfied on the calibration of both. Let's have a look where I'm I'm going to play this video a couple of times. The one on the left control. That's like normal. And then the one on the right, we added, to the system. Some interlock. All right, look through that, sprayed that, and then look at this one.

This guy over. Yeah. That's that's done. So we nearly lost him because we, we like on our own a bit in the sun. But, you can see that pulsing over there. You can see that pulsing. That's the same command. And then obviously with a frame frame rate, of the cell phone. But yeah, it's all not murky.

And let's see what the English word is, but hazy, hazy and a much clearer spray pattern there. But even look at the, look at the, the wet footprint here. Same volume. Look at they look at that wet footprint versus that wet footprint. So this is important. So what I'm saying even with aim command good nozzles. Good.

Good sprayer equipment, and aim command added added technology like the aim command. You can still make the difference with good care, with a good adjuvant such as interlock. Now this was just with water. This is going to be accentuated when you start mixing in, different chemicals. We've shown a lot of things with, with water sensitive paper despite the, it definitely does help to paint a picture for us.

The only thing with the water sensitive paper is not always a true reflection of deposition, it shows you contact a water droplet might hit that water sensitive paper beat up and roll off, bounce off, or whatever, but it will show up as a contact point as, as the deposition point.

But they might not be retention. So what we found was we needed another way to go and look at, deposition. And in particular through, retention on site. We we've got, a UV sensitive dye, one of these ultraviolet dyes that you can see on the blacklight. Mix that into the systems. That's what we do these days.

And when we do the calibration of the of the sprayers, run that over the, over the target and then have a look at how the deposition. And I want to say, how retention on the targets look like. Yeah. You can see in daylight we can't always wait for the night. We've got this “spookhuis”, not shure what it is in English haunted house, ghost house, ghosts gazebos, probably a better thing.

The “spookhuis”. So during the demos on the former days. Do the application, pick it up, get four guys, move it up anyway in the field. Drop it down in the field. Go in with your blacklight. Go and have a look. It's a quick look. That thing goes 45 50°C very quickly in the. But it gives you the opportunity to go and have, an assessment of how the retention on target looks like.

Yeah. On the right hand side, just a picture of some wheat, that we did. On the next session, I will go back, pardon the pun, deeper into this and show you way down the, fungicide application point that I'm trying to make. We've got some new technology, and these two ways to, to determine how your retention on target looks like.

Second most, our next, our next webinars, which the doctor, Brian de Villiers, will present to us, is going to be all about that retention, target, obviously also in the tank but on target. What happens with your spray mix once it gets to that target? I spoken on the journey there. We will cover what's happening.

On the target, the on the left hand side. So that water just beating up, running off in the middle one. No ionic surfactant. Spray to spray the water. Everybody use the same exact surface tension. You get retention, but know on the right hand side you will see it looks different that droplet. It's got more humectant. See, that's keeping it that couple of minutes more moist in difficult circumstances.

Or if you have difficult surfaces on which you need to deposit chemistry to really stay just that little bit longer, moist for absorption to go in. Not just that, no, I'm not going to run. Run away. I was starting to talk about the waxy leaf layers and and the hairy surface areas. I'm going to leave that for Brian, I'm going to leave that for a Brian, anyway.

So teaser: Watch out. We're going to invite you guys, for the next, for the next sessions very soon, probably in about two weeks time. All right. Last one. Take-home message on this. Control what you can control, starting with your equipment. Right. Equipment selection.

Understanding what the capabilities and the parameters of operation is of, of your equipment. Chemistry does influence droplet size. Be mindful of that. Understand that you need to have control. You need depth penetration leads to better deposition. And I should actually add and better retention adjuvants. Not the orphans in the tank. They should never be the orphans in the tank.

They are not the add ons. A lot of our growers still believe, the agents or the advisors selling, an event that is for his fishing trip or for his house by the coast. That is not the case. Every adjuvant has a particular, purpose and function in some way. I wish I could give a one in all that does everything in the tank, in the air, and on the target, unfortunately, doesn't work like that.

There are adjuvants that we need to add to the tank that only works in the tank in the a very specific ones on the target, very specific ones on. Please do understand they are not orphan add ons and manage application risk with interlock. After you've done all the rest and understand the rest, then you have tool with solid data to show what, what the benefit is and, and how we can mitigate the risk.

Anyway, guys, I once again want to apologize. This might seem very like, might be repetitive to some of you that have already, listen to this. But, I hope it was insightful, or at least, to start making a conversation so that we can go in deeper on this. And after discussion with your top specialist, if I'm available, any of my other colleagues are available.

I don't get out in the trenches as much as I would have liked to these days anymore. But, I really hope that this, can stimulate some conversation on good application going forward.

Please. Guys, drop maybe the questions, for us via email.

You'll give me an opportunity to really give insightful and in-depth answers to this. We can't, unfortunately, do everybody answer for everybody. So I do apologize for that. Thank you for your time and, hope to be able to see some of you guys very soon. Thank you.