Mark Gleason, Professor, Iowa State University Department of Plant Pathology, Entomology, and Microbiology in the U.S., describes the pesticide problem and in this vein, why testing new options are needed to sustain apple production
Agricultural pesticides have an image problem. Public concern about the health and environmental risks of pesticide use on crops keeps intensifying. But for apple production, using pesticides is a necessity, not a choice.
Apple growers are at least as concerned about pesticides as everyone else. But effective non-pesticide alternatives have not appeared. Apple production still relies heavily on chemical pesticides to deliver fruit that consumers want to buy.
Apples often get sprayed 10 to 15 times a year, making them one of the most pesticide-intensive crops. And the out-of-pocket costs of this practice – pesticides, labour, machinery, and so on – have skyrocketed in recent years.
How can apple growers get off this escalator and safeguard their profits? Our three-year project, funded by USDA-NIFA’s Crop Protection and Pest Management (CPPM) program, looks at two options that could offer immediate help.
Option 1: Precision spray technology
Airblast sprayers. “Airblast” sprayers – the standard hardware for spraying apples – have been around for 70 years. The pesticide mix is pumped from a tank through nozzles, then pushed into the trees with a powerful fan.
Intelligent Sprayer. A new technology called the Intelligent Sprayer sprays only what it “sees.” It uses the same LiDAR technology as driverless cars. The Intelligent Sprayer sends out laser beams and senses their reflections from the apple trees. A computer attached to the sensor instantly makes a map of each tree. Then the computer triggers only the nozzles that aim at the foliage – hitting the target much more accurately than an airblast sprayer.
The Intelligent Sprayer is the brainchild of a USDA Agricultural Engineer, Heping Zhu. At the USDA-ARS spray lab in Wooster, Ohio, Dr Zhu and his Technician Adam Clark cobbled together the early prototypes and tested them on tree and vine crops from peaches to pecans to grapes, tweaking the technology year after year.
Option 2: Disease-warning systems
Disease-warning systems are another tool that could hold down pesticide application costs for apple growers. They use relationships between weather conditions – for example, relative humidity, rainfall and temperature – and disease risk to time sprays more efficiently.
For generations, growers have pre-scheduled sprays based on calendar dates rather than weather conditions. So why bother to use the weather to time sprays for disease control? The payoff can be fewer sprays per season. Sprays are wasted if they go on when disease risk is low. Disease-warning systems often save several sprays per season by triggering a spray only when there is a real risk of an outbreak.
Click here to read the full press release.
For more information:
Jose Gonzalez Acuna
Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa 50011
[email protected]
