0:05
Thank you so much for being here.

0:07
I’ll give it to you we’re already about 10 minutes of your time, by the way.

0:10
So, yeah, don’t worry.

0:12
I’m just going to add on an extra half an hour onto what I originally had planned.

0:15
So thanks.

0:16
Rodrigo set the bar way too high there.

0:18
Let’s bring that back down, OK?

0:19
I’m not that smart and this is going to be very basic stuff, OK, so let’s bring it back down a notch from that.

0:25
I also do wish I could come up here and say that just because of our rivalry, right, that everything Rodrigo said in his first slide is pure garbage.

0:33
And don’t listen to a where he says, unfortunately, I agree with every word that he had on there.

0:39
I know what I’m saying.

0:39
Said it once, you missed it.

0:41
OK?

0:41
So, he’s right, like everything he has on there I completely agree with.

0:44
And actually my presentation is kind of kind of go through most of what he said and give some examples of some of those things, even just from a broader broadcast application scale, not just a targeted application scale.

0:55
So 100% want to point that out.

0:57
And then one other thing before I get started.

0:59
OK, I have a favor to ask.

1:01
All right.

1:01
My father-in-law is in attendance today.

1:03
Jerry, where you at?

1:05
Wave your hands.

1:06
There he is up there.

1:07
OK.

1:08
I need everybody to listen very closely, laugh at my jokes, make it really good so I get a good report back to the family.

1:16
OK.

1:17
All right.

1:17
Appreciate it.

1:18
Thank you.

1:19
Yeah, that’s true.

1:20
Yeah.

1:20
All right.

1:21
So with that being said, jumping into the presentation, the first thing I like to start off with, with any basic application talk is the fact that when we’re trying to do pesticide applications and particularly herbicide applications, we are constantly in a seesaw battling act with what we’re trying to do, right.

1:39
So you can see up here on one side I’ve got drift and on the other side I’ve got coverage.

1:43
So the way we manage those two things are completely opposite, right?

1:47
To get the maximum effectiveness, if we’re trying to reduce drift, we normally get a bigger droplet size.

1:51
Well, that’s not ideal for coverage and weed control.

1:53
If we want to get more coverage, we do a smaller droplet size, right?

1:57
Well, now we have a higher drift potential.

1:58
So we’re constantly battling each other with this.

2:01
Now I can talk about that ’til I’m blue in the face, or I could do a demonstration and have everybody kind of wake up in the morning because I’m still a little sleepy too.

2:08
So that’s what I’m going to do real quick is a demonstration to help emphasize this battling complex thing that we’re doing with with applications and why they’re so complex.

2:17
So I need 2 volunteers real quick.

2:20
It’s better to be a volunteer in this one than in the audience.

2:22
I’m just letting you know.

2:23
All right, All right, Calli, you get your first choice of bucket.

2:32
You want that one?

2:33
Oh, good choice.

2:34
All right.

2:34
Oh, no, I’m spilling.

2:36
We’re spilling.

2:37
We this this don’t, don’t call the EPA.

2:40
We had a spill.

2:42
Sorry.

2:42
All right, so you get this bucket.

2:44
All right now.

2:45
Oh, sorry, you got yours open.

2:46
So I would like to apologise.

2:48
OK, I apologize, Calli.

2:50
Actually, you’ve got like half the volume that’s in this bucket, right?

2:53
So it’s kind of an already unfair advantage.

2:55
We’ve got half the volume versus this one to try and control some pests.

3:00
So, you two are my spray applicators OK?

3:03
Calli’s got a fine spray over here.

3:05
And I’m sorry, what’s your name?

3:07
Shay.

3:07
Shay’s got an ultra coarse spray over here.

3:09
So big droplet size, small droplet size.

3:12
Calli’s got half the volume.

3:13
She’s at a disadvantage.

3:15
Audience.

3:15
Everybody, please stand up.

3:16
Quick.

3:17
We have a whole bunch of waterhemp in this field that we need to control.

3:21
OK, nice.

3:23
So, Calli, you volunteered first.

3:24
I’ll let you start.

3:25
OK, control as many waterhemp as you possibly can with your spray right there.

3:29
Take care.

3:38
All right, anybody that got hit, please sit down.

3:40
Oh, I’m not sure if you’re wrong.

3:44
There’s a lot of waterhemp left.

3:46
You are going to get some complaints on this one, let me tell you.

3:49
OK.

3:50
All right, Shay, your turn.

3:51
You had advantage.

3:52
You had more volume.

3:53
Go ahead, try and control as many pests as you can.

3:55
You can just throw them however you want to throw them.

3:57
Control as many pests as you possibly can.

4:02
There you go.

4:03
See, that’s how you do it.

4:06
All right, if you got hit, sit down. OK, even less coverage there, right?

4:11
We got even less pest control.

4:13
We got a whole lot of waterhemp that’s still standing out here.

4:16
You guys aren’t going to have a future job as applicators.

4:18
I’m just letting you know that.

4:19
All right, so everybody can sit back down again.

4:22
What I want to highlight there is two different things, though, OK?

4:25
One, this is a really good emphasis of just how difficult it actually is to make a good solid herbicide application, OK?

4:33
There’s a lot of things that can go wrong just trying to make an application in reality though, the real things that I wanted to kind of point out here, right?

4:40
Let’s start with the fine spray.

4:42
The fine spray I said right at the start actually was at a disadvantage because it had let half the volume, right?

4:47
It was only only half that bucket was filled.

4:50
But we control the whole patch of the weeds really well, right?

4:53
Like we got really good coverage in that one area.

4:56
Unfortunately, those droplets just kind of went everywhere, right?

4:59
Like they weren’t really going anywhere with any solid direction.

5:02
So there was a lot of drift, a lot off target movement.

5:05
Whereas when we had the great big ones and y’all can leave them, I can step over them and stuff, we can get to them later, that’s fine.

5:11
The great big droplets, right?

5:14
They had a lot of direction and velocity behind them.

5:16
They went straight to targets.

5:17
But because there was just so few droplets, we could control a whole lot less, right?

5:22
So we had a lot of drift reduction, but we could not get near the same coverage and control as many pests because we just didn’t have the same amount of droplets there, OK?

5:31
So very challenging, these two things counteracting each other that we’re battling with, with trying to make good applications.

5:37
So that being said, how do we do better, right?

5:40
How can we kind of balance these two worlds out?

5:44
If you ever listen to me talk, I preach about nozzles until I’m blue in the face.

5:49
OK, nozzles are our number one thing that we can do to try and and have a better spray application across the board.

5:56
They control a whole lot of things.

5:57
They control drop droplet size, you know, spray angle, spray velocity, you know, the the drift potential.

6:05
Nozzles control everything right when it comes to the, the last point of contact that we can try and have for managing weeds and everything else.

6:12
So I’m going to go into a little bit on nozzles and how we can make some better selections are better setups when it comes to nozzles for spray applications.

6:20
Now, first and foremost, we all have to know a little bit about what we’re talking about when it comes to nozzle nomenclature, right?

6:26
When I ask a question, what nozzle are you using on your sprayer?

6:31
What do you think

6:31
The number one response I get is? Flat fan.

6:35
Nope, not even that descriptive.

6:37
I don’t know.

6:38
I don’t know is is up there.

6:40
That is definitely what top one too.

6:42
Color, color.

6:43
I get told I’m using the red ones.

6:46
That tells me basically nothing.

6:48
OK, color tells you the size of the nozzle.

6:51
It tells you what the flow rate is.

6:53
OK, that’s something I guess.

6:55
But it tells me nothing about the droplet size, what the the spray angle is out of it.

7:00
You know what your drift potential is?

7:03
Nothing.

7:03
I know what flow rate you’re trying to get out of it.

7:05
That’s it.

7:06
When I color.

7:07
So on the nozzle, every single nozzle has three different pieces of information printed on it.

7:12
The first one’s the nozzle type.

7:14
OK, This is always one of the most important things.

7:16
If you really want to understand what’s going on with your spray applications, you got to know this.

7:20
And then you can go back to a nozzle catalog and look, start looking up.

7:23
OK, well, what droplet sizes is that producing?

7:25
What’s the recommendations for pressures and, and boom height and other things like that, But you got to start there.

7:32
The second one is the spray fan angle.

7:35
So how wide is that angle?

7:37
OK.

7:37
In this case, it’s at least a minimum of 110° fan.

7:41
There’s some 120s out there, there’s some 80s out there.

7:45
There’s even some narrower ones when we start talking about some of the new targeted applications, right?

7:50
Even all the way down to a 20° angle.

7:52
So that will tell you what your spray angle is and then decide how do you overlap properly, right, based on boom height or other things or nozzle spacing.

8:01
We need to get a proper overlap to get a proper coverage.

8:05
And then the final one, which is also based on color, that actually tells you your flow rate.

8:10
So what that number tells me, the 04 or the red color tells me that at 40 PSI with water, this nozzle is going to get me .4 gallons per minute, OK.

8:21
If this was an 05 at 40 PSI, I have .5 gallons per minute out of that nozzle at 40 PSI, OK.

8:29
That’s important for trying to select the right size nozzle to go across an application to make sure we’re getting the right rate.

8:37
Just again, to emphasize how different nozzles will drastically change our droplet size, coverage and drift potential.

8:43
I’ve got a couple high speed videos here from my days in Nebraska that you can see on the left is the XR flat fan nozzle.

8:50
Very fine

8:50
spray. This gray cloud in the background.

8:55
Yeah, that’s all fine

8:56
spray droplets that are not moving anywhere, they’re just suspended.

9:01
If we had any sort of wind at all and we weren’t in a controlled environment that is highly driftable moving off target, right, hitting everything else downwind, OK, Versus if we go to a TTI nozzle, the Ultra Core spray that just sprays bowling balls out of it, OK, You can see there’s no gray cloud in the back, very minimal drift potential, but they are very, very large droplets that we’re trying to retain then on leaf surfaces, particularly if we’re talking about very small plants, grass species, things like that, OK, It becomes a lot more difficult with a with an ultra core spray like the TTI there.

9:37
So this is what we’re trying to balance now.

9:40
I just mentioned the nozzle sizing part.

9:42
I also run into a lot of issues when I’m given talks to people are given recommendations that we don’t have our nozzles sized correctly.

9:50
And it seems like a small thing, but I’m going to tell you little things when it comes to applications, they add up, right?

9:56
If you have 5% here, 5% there, 5% here, all of a sudden, you’re talking 15 to 20% reduction in weed control and with waterhemp, right?

10:04
That makes a huge difference, OK, 2% makes a huge difference when it comes to waterhemp.

10:10
So the little things add up.

10:12
So when it comes to nozzle sizing, sorry, a little bit of math this morning.

10:15
Don’t worry, I’ll walk you through it though.

10:16
OK, We don’t have to do, it’s not a test on it today.

10:19
OK, this equation over here should be your best friend at calculating what size nozzle do I need based on my fields and my spray application practices.

10:30
OK, so if you look at this, we’re going to calculate our gallons per minute that we need out of a nozzle based on what GPA we want to spray, what our nozzle spacing is, and what speed we want to go.

10:40
So I did make this in my time in Arkansas as well.

10:43
So you’ll notice I started off with an application of 10 GPA, 20 inch spacing, and 20 miles an hour.

10:49
I don’t think we’re doing 20 in Wisconsin.

10:52
In Arkansas, 20 is an everyday occurrence.

10:54
That’s slow.

10:55
We slam it in road

10:56
gear and just hope for the best.

10:58
OK, but just take this as an example.

11:01
You can apply it to your fields as well because the math still holds true, right?

11:05
So we got 10 GPA, 20 inch spacing, 20 miles an hour.

11:08
If you do the math on that, it comes out to .67 gallons per minute.

11:11
So to get that output, you can do two different things.

11:15
You could use an 06 nozzle and instead of 40 PSI, right, because that would give us .6 gallons per minute.

11:21
We just up our pressure sum to 54 PSI and we can get that output.

11:25
Or we could go to a larger nozzle in 08 and we drop the pressure down to 31 PSI and we can get that same output.

11:32
Now looking at that and neither one of those bothers me that both options seem decent, right?

11:36
You’re probably fine either way.

11:38
OK, they’re both the same type of nozzle.

11:40
They’re both UR.

11:41
So relatively speaking, the droplet size is pretty much similar, you know, maybe a little bit bigger from the 08, but nothing to really be crazy about.

11:49
So roughly very similar there.

11:51
Now, if you have a pulsing sprayer, how many people are familiar with the pulsing sprayers out there?

11:56
OK, quite a few hands, right?

11:57
They’ve gained a lot of popularity on that one.

12:00
You can do a completely different set up and I’ll get into pulsing later on in the presentation as well, but just to highlight nozzle selection on them.

12:07
OK, if you have the pulsing system, you run that same thing.

12:10
You still need .67 gallons per minute, but instead of having to change pressure, what it’ll do is it’ll fluctuate its duty cycle, right?

12:19
How long those nozzles are actually open.

12:21
And so a, a very common nozzle type that I saw in Arkansas and, and in general in various places with pulsing sprayers is a 10, right?

12:29
So one gallon per minute nozzle.

12:31
Well at that, if you can operate it at 40 PSI and then it’s basically a 70% duty cycle.

12:37
So the nozzles open about 70% of the time and you can get your output also, again, I don’t have complaints about that.

12:44
OK, pulsing at a 70% duty cycle is not a bad deal.

12:48
So on that pulsing sprayer that works too.

12:51
OK, now here’s the complicating thing, especially in Wisconsin, none of our fields are flat, big and open, are they?

13:01
We have borders that we need to slow down around.

13:04
We have we come up to the headlands, we have to slow down.

13:06
We have hills that make us speed up or go slower and stuff, right?

13:10
So if you take this same example and instead of doing 20 miles an hour, we drop it to 12 miles an hour.

13:17
OK, so we’re cutting our speed down.

13:19
Now the math tells us that we only have need .4 gallons per minute.

13:24
So if you use those same nozzles, we don’t change anything, right?

13:27
Because who changes nozzles on a sprayer?

13:30
That’s a dumb idea.

13:32
I’m looking at all of y’all right now.

13:33
OK, this is my disappointed parenting look that I have to give my toddlers.

13:37
OK, so we don’t change nozzles .4 gallons per minute.

13:41
Now if we have that 06 nozzle, we have to drop all the way down to 18 PSI to get that output.

13:47
If it’s the 08 nozzle, it’s all the way down to 10 PSI.

13:51
Have you all ever looked at a nozzle catalog?

13:53
Is that even recommended by the manufacturer?

13:56
No.

13:57
You know the lowest, there’s a few nozzles out there where you can get down to like 15 PSI, but that’s few and far between, right?

14:05
A lot of them are 20 and 30 PSI is the lower recommended option range.

14:09
And so we’re well below that.

14:10
Spray patterns don’t form correctly.

14:12
We’re going to have skips in the field.

14:14
The droplets are going to basically be drooling out of that nozzle, typically because it’s not enough pressure to force it through.

14:20
And if you happen to have any diaphragm caps, you know, a lot of the times our diaphragm caps are set to 10 PSI or so, you’re not even going to be able to open some of those diaphragm caps, right?

14:29
So it gets very, very minuscule in a hurry that that’s not feasible.

14:33
Now the pulsing side, everybody says, oh, well, the pulsing side will fix it.

14:36
You know, that’ll just adjust the, the amount that it’s open.

14:40
Well, so if you do the math there again too, if you keep it at 40 PSI with that 10 nozzle, now it drops it down to approximately a 40% duty cycle.

14:49
And if you’re at a 40% duty cycle, now you might have two nozzles next to each other that go off at the same time.

14:55
So you have a much higher likelihood of a skip.

14:57
And also in some of our research, we’ve shown that if you drop below that 50% duty cycle, you start getting weird things with droplet size and again, spray pattern formation and just other things that go wrong.

15:08
Again, little things, but little things add up.

15:11
OK, so the moral of the story here is that when you’re sizing nozzles, we can’t just consider max speed.

15:18
We want to travel at and max out, you know, one single application set up.

15:23
You have to think about the different scenarios that you’re going to go through, right?

15:27
What’s the speed range I might typically hit in a field?

15:30
Do I jump from 10 GPA to 20 GPA in different application settings?

15:34
Because that would likely, you know, involve a different nozzle change, you know, am I spraying contact versus systemic herbicides, stuff like that.

15:43
So my main highlight there is we’ve really got to consider to start using two, three sets of nozzles, right, for our different application setups, OK.

15:52
If we’re jumping from 10 to 20 GPA, if we’re trying to do contacts versus herbicides and we got to size them appropriately, get them in the right window, don’t just try and max out everything that we can possibly do, OK?

16:04
That’ll get us a lot better off down the road as well.

16:08
Any questions on nozzle sizing?

16:12
Perfect.

16:12
Let’s get out of math.

16:13
Talk about another thing, nozzle arrangement.

16:16
These nozzles have become fairly popular, especially on the John Deere sprayers.

16:20
These are 3D nozzles.

16:22
What’s interesting about these is they have this spray angle to them, right?

16:26
The exit orifice is angled out of them.

16:28
The TTI also has an angle to it emitting out that spray.

16:32
So we did a study when we were in Arkansas looking at how the arrangement might affect coverage and weed control of different things.

16:39
So with this setup, across the boom, you can have three different potential setups.

16:44
OK, you could stick all of these nozzles one direction and have them all facing forward, right?

16:50
You could do the opposite and have them all facing backward.

16:54
Or you could go across the boom and every other one you alternate.

16:57
One goes forward, one goes backward.

16:59
Do you think this matters?

17:03
Yes.

17:04
Why? I think you I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.

17:07
You you go to Madison, you’ve lost a lot of OK, do you think it matters?

17:15
They’re actually not wrong in this case.

17:17
The one instance Rodrigo’s students aren’t wrong.

17:19
OK, it does matter.

17:21
All right, so just to look, I’m just going to show you some coverage cards and, and coverage estimates.

17:26
So up here in the right hand corner to lay this out, here’s our setup that we did.

17:31
We had a top card, right, where it’s just the top horizontal card.

17:34
And then we tried to simulate basically what a plant is.

17:37
So we have a card vertical on the front and a card vertical on the back.

17:41
And our sprayer is travelling this way.

17:44
OK?

17:44
A lot of times when you see coverage, it’s people talking about one directional surface, right?

17:50
When we’re trying to control weeds.

17:51
Weeds are not one-dimensional or two-dimensional, I should say, right?

17:56
They have angles on all over the place.

17:58
And if you’re talking about something like waterhemp where it has multiple branches everywhere, you need to try and cover that whole thing as much as possible, not just the top of it, right?

18:06
Because that’s where we burn out the meristem at the top and then it just regrows from underneath.

18:10
So that’s what we were trying to look at is all around coverage.

18:14
Now, I’ve got a couple different comparisons here.

18:15
So I’ve got the AIXR as a standard versus the 3D all facing forward, the 3D all facing backward and the 3D in that alternating pattern formation.

18:25
OK, Now 3D looks a little bit better than the AIXR here as far as coverage goes.

18:30
That’s because it’s a little bit smaller of a droplet size.

18:32
So don’t the take home there isn’t that the 3D is a better nozzle necessarily than the AIXR.

18:37
It’s pretty good nozzle, but it’s not necessarily better just because of that.

18:40
It’s a little bit smaller droplet size.

18:42
But the main thing I want to highlight here is when you’re looking at that very top card, that horizontal thing, there’s not much of a difference across the board here, right?

18:51
Pretty much any orientation will work just about the same.

18:54
It’s fine.

18:56
Maybe the alternating gets you a little bit better than some of the other ones.

19:00
Now the real story to the tape though, is when we get to these front and back cards.

19:04
So if you look at the front card, the one that we’re driving at, OK, the AIXR is still getting us 18% coverage with it being a straight down nozzle.

19:13
If we face all the 3DS forward, hey, that front card looks pretty plastered.

19:17
We hit it really well.

19:18
OK, 27% coverage, all the ones that were facing backwards though barely touched that front card.

19:25
We only got 3% effectively we missed the whole front side of a plant.

19:31
Again, waterhemp, that’s a big deal, especially say with a contact-based herbicide.

19:35
Now if we alternate it, we weren’t as good as the 3D four, but we were still pretty darn good 16, you know, 16 to 20%, just a little bit less than what we had on the top.

19:45
So we’re still getting a good amount on that front, OK.

19:49
Now if we switch to the back card, the AIXR is at 8%.

19:55
So the straight down nozzles getting us some pretty good coverage on the back still.

19:59
The forward basically got us nothing.

20:00
It was less than 1%, OK.

20:03
So when they’re all facing forward, we got absolutely nothing on the backside of that plant.

20:07
The backward, OK, we only had 3% on the front.

20:10
Well, now we only got 12% on the back too.

20:12
So it helped the back but nothing great, whereas our alternating again got us.

20:18
A good middle ground.

20:19
We were able to get coverage on all three sides of that plant by alternating those nozzles and trying to get our covered across the board.

20:26
If we have an angled spray, our straight down nozzles tend to do this on their own.

20:32
OK, so again, nozzle selection and then setup comes into practice here.

20:36
If you have an angled spray, you really want to try and alternate them.

20:40
You’ll get better all around coverage.

20:42
You should get better overall control across the board. Now with targeted applications,

20:48
this is another conversation because we have limiting factors with some of our algorithms and things right now, right?

20:53
We have to have them all facing backward just for the timing of things currently.

20:58
But that’s constantly improving, right?

21:00
With a lot of this technology, I like to say we’re on the ground floor level.

21:03
We’re basically in kindergarten learning how to count.

21:07
We got to give ourselves a few more years, right?

21:08
Let’s get to high school with some of this stuff and good night where we’re going to be at at that point, right?

21:14
So the processing speed, the, the training of the algorithms, everything else that will all improve.

21:19
And we’ll be able to do some of these things to again, get back to the, the best possible application set up even for targeted applications then too.

21:27
But I just like to make you aware how you plug these nozzles on at times can drastically change where we’re getting spray to deposit.

21:35
All right, so wrapping up the nozzle select section, nozzle decisions are absolutely key.

21:40
They affect all kinds of different things, right?

21:43
Droplet size, drift potential, coverage compatibility, I didn’t even talk about, but flow rate, spray pattern, all of that nozzle is a drastically important piece of equipment that we often neglect.

21:54
I like to tell the story that I have watched people trading in a sprayer to buy a brand new, you know, half $1,000,000 sprayer or more, and as soon as they sign the paperwork, I watch them trade the nozzles off of their old one to put on the new one.

22:09
OK, don’t do that.

22:12
All right?

22:12
Nozzles are so important.

22:14
And I and the last claim I’ll make, they are the last opportunity for us as applicators to have control over an application before it goes into Mother Nature’s hands, right?

22:24
Why not make that the absolute best possible setup we can to set ourselves up for as much success as possible before we give it to Mother Nature to take over?

22:34
OK, so focus on nozzles a lot now.

22:36
There’s a whole lot of of details and other things with nozzles that it comes to you and there’s not enough time to cover everything.

22:42
So if you ever have any questions on some of that, you know, feel free to reach out to me.

22:46
Feel free to reach out to the nozzle manufacturers.

22:49
They are wealth of information as well.

22:51
Their catalogues give a ton of good information.

22:54
Check all of that out.

22:54
There is so much information out there to help with this that it can go a long way.

22:59
All right.

23:00
Before I move on to my next section, any questions on nozzles?

23:05
Yes, yes.

23:07
No, you’re not allowed, Jerry.

23:09
OK.

23:10
Are there any real questions on nozzles?

23:12
What’s the real question?

23:13
OK, go ahead, Jerry.

23:15
That’s a great question.

23:16
So the question is basically, when does this kind of change with travel speed or maybe just in general, how does travel speed affect some of this stuff, right?

23:25
Generally speaking, if we take the wind speed out of it, right, the faster you go, the worse the backward angle is going to be, right?

23:35
Because your, your wind is pushing it more backwards out of the way.

23:38
And then you have the force of it too.

23:40
That’s going to make that one even worse.

23:41
When we did this study, we were travelling at like 5 or 6 miles an hour.

23:44
We had kind of our small rig, right?

23:46
So, the faster you travel, the backwards one is going to be worse.

23:49
The front one maybe should do a little bit better at that point because it’s going to act more like a straight down nozzle kind of thing.

23:56
Alternating should still be the best. The as far as like when does sprayer speed really start to ruin coverage?

24:08
It’s tough.

24:09
We’ve had some research on it, but it’s tough to narrow that down super specifically because it’s speed effects everything.

24:15
And so then we have to change pressure or droplet size or whatever else.

24:18
But some of the initial data roughly showed that up to about 10 miles an hour, you’re, you’re relatively about the same coverage and weed control.

24:30
Once you start getting past 10, you start seeing it to break at times.

24:33
So we saw it like at 15 miles an hour, we started seeing breaks where we’d lose some weed control, we’d lose some coverage.

24:39
And, and in that’s in the lab, that’s in, you know, controlled research environments in the field.

24:44
As you speed up, it gets worse too, because folks tend to raise their booms right to, to get across the field and not slam nozzles into the ground.

24:52
And then that’s going to make it worse because you’re going to have less coverage with a higher boom height.

24:55
So it’s the albatross effect, I like to call it.

24:58
So generally speaking, if you’re going, and I don’t like to say you have to go less than 15 because I know in times, right, we got to, we got to do what we got to do.

25:07
But if you can do less than 15, you’re probably better off.

25:11
Yeah, thanks.

25:15
So the question is, is pressure a big deciding factor with coverage?

25:18
Are you talk, where are you talking coverage all the all the way around from 30 PSI to 60 PSI.

25:25
So generally speaking, pressure doesn’t affect coverage a whole lot.

25:30
It changes droplet size, right?

25:32
And so if you raise your pressure, you’re going to get a smaller droplet size.

25:36
You should get slightly better coverage, but it’s a lot smaller than changing a nozzle type, right?

25:43
It’s a much more minuscule thing, a lot of people.

25:46
So the reason I ask what you’re talking about with coverage too, right?

25:49
A lot of people, a lot of times I’ll get the comment that, well, I need to turn up my pressure so I can slam the spray down into the canopy, right?

25:56
I need to get down onto the lower stems and kill out the lower branches.

25:59
That’s actually a fallacy that does not work, OK.

26:03
Because again, what I just said is if you increase your pressure, you’re going to create a finer spray.

26:08
Finer sprays have less velocity behind them and they won’t make it into the canopy.

26:13
They’ll get stuck at the top.

26:14
So if you want to get more canopy penetration and coverage more down in, you actually need a bigger droplet size.

26:22
OK, generally speaking, and this is all very general, generally speaking, you end up needing a bigger droplet size that those droplets have a little bit more weight behind them.

26:30
So that’s does that answer your question?

26:32
Well, yeah, most of them are nozzle has a chart they’ll show you droplet size per pressure.

26:38
Yeah.

26:39
And and that’s it’s basically the droplet size thing, right?

26:42
So I try and run at a pressure where I can get a droplet size that I want, which is normally about a coarse, unless that’s mandated on the label that I have to have bigger.

26:51
I kind of want to be in that coarse category.

26:54
And so I’ll pick my nozzle and my pressure to get me into that category.

26:58
Does that make sense?

26:59
OK, Yeah, yes.

27:03
So the great question.

27:04
So the question is some systems and they even actually make adapters now where you can do kind of the two nozzle design and stuff too.

27:09
But basically you have two nozzles on the same sprayer, right?

27:12
So one on the front, one on the back, basically what you just described is the best way to do it, right?

27:18
You pick one that’s slightly coarser on the front and I I don’t like to go massive unless I have to, but say like a very coarse or an extremely coarse, you can put that on the front and then you can put a finer spray on the back, like say a medium or something that actually has been shown to work really well.

27:33
Womack out of Tennessee did some research on that and showed that it worked very, very well.

27:37
And actually the larger spray, this is weird.

27:40
I don’t know how this all worked.

27:41
OK, this is physics that’s out of my, you know, basic weed science brain.

27:44
But he basically showed if you put that coarser spray nozzle on the front, it kind of acts like a shield for the nozzle on the back and you’ll actually get reduced drift from the finer spray on the back, which is really slick.

27:55
So that can be a very effective setup.

27:59
It just adds some complications.

28:02
I would say with making sure that you’re selecting everything appropriately and understanding, like especially say on the exact apply system where you have the, the completely separate settings and everything else that you get all of that set up correctly.

28:15
Because otherwise you can really mess it up if you don’t set it up correctly.

28:17
But yeah, definitely a very viable option.

28:19
Yeah, yeah.

28:23
The, the short, the short answer.

28:25
So the question is basically like optimizing setups when you have all of these confounding effects, right?

28:31
So, Enlist and Liberty drop what droplet size is better for each of those if you have a tank mix versus not a tank mix if you have all of that stuff going on and and Liberty make them simple.

28:40
Yes.

28:41
So generally speaking, across the board, like I, I can make this claim fairly confidently across the board.

28:48
It’s not right 100% of the time, but it’s right in extension right a number of times.

28:53
It’s it’s good enough for extension.

28:54
OK, if you get me into like a coarse category, you know, of coarse, even a very coarse at times, you’re good for just about everything.

29:04
I’ve got some Liberty data from my PhD where like we could go up to even an extremely coarse at times and still get 90% of our maximum level of weed control.

29:12
Now I don’t like to do that, right?

29:14
I’d rather be down in like a coarse category.

29:16
But basically, and I and unlike the Enlist label, Enlist coarse to very coarse satisfies that requirement.

29:23
So I just pick that, that layer and I can get the best of both worlds on that.

29:28
So, this is why I was having a conversation with Stephen Schwartz from John Deere earlier, right?

29:32
He, he doesn’t like that I like the AIXR so much.

29:35
OK.

29:36
But I like the AIXR a whole lot because I’d already talked about I don’t, I can’t get guys to change nozzles, right.

29:43
If I’m going to pick one that works for me 85% of the time it’s the AIXR.

29:47
It’s going to work for me the vast majority of the time.

29:49
I can get guys to adopt that nozzle and it covers the vast majority in my bases.

29:53
And that one would satisfy the Enlist and the Liberty.

29:56
It works good for both.

29:58
It works really good for the tank mixture of that.

30:00
So does that kind of get at, well, go get it come in.

30:04
It’s an air induction flat fan.

30:05
Yeah.

30:06
So so air induction.

30:07
OK.

30:08
So going back to that part, air induction versus non air induction, I don’t care.

30:12
It doesn’t matter in my book.

30:14
It’s what category can you get to?

30:16
There are some non air induction nozzles that can get you into those categories too, like Wilger, right.

30:21
And so then I don’t care.

30:21
Just get me that category.

30:23
Now I do care if we’re talking about a pulsing sprayer, which I don’t know if I’m going to have time to really go through.

30:28
But if you’re on a pulsing sprayer no Mr.

30:34
uh uh no, you ate 15 minutes into my time get out of here.

30:37
I’ve got at least 15 minutes and don’t let Rodrigo tell you otherwise.

30:41
All right so on the pulsing side there I want non air induction only for various reasons.

30:47
I can show a couple videos why, but otherwise I don’t care.

30:50
Just get me the the spray classification and I’m good with it.

30:53
Your in-row waterhemp we just talked about yeah, I mean again for that it’s that changes a whole lot of dynamics because we’re talking are we are we talking little droplets down at the OR a little waterhemp down at the bottom?

31:04
Are we talking about like the picture that Nicholas showed that’s a revenge spray that popped up late in the season too.

31:09
That changes on what what I’m trying to like what would be optimum, but if I’m just trying to cover my bases as much as possible again, get me in that coarse category across the board as much as possible.

31:19
Good, you pass solid.

31:21
All right, all right, real quick, let’s go into a few other things just to help emphasize this is, you know who I trust spraying my fields, the list of people spraying my fields.

31:29
OK, PWM, I’ll skip over this a little bit, but most people were familiar with pulsing.

31:35
The main thing like I that I want to highlight on this.

31:38
So with these solenoid valves, there actually is a pressure loss across those things.

31:41
So we’re talking about optimum pressures.

31:44
We have to make note of this because if we’re operating at too low of a pressure, those solenoid valves will actually drop our pressure even more and we can get below the nozzle manufacturer recommendations in a hurry.

31:54
So this was some of my research in Nebraska.

31:56
The red circle is all 04 nozzles.

31:58
This one down here is an 08 nozzle.

32:01
So as we get a bigger size, we have a larger pressure drop up to 8 to 10 PSI across that solenoid valve.

32:07
So that’s why I generally say I want to be at 40 PSI or more on a pulsing sprayer because I know I’m probably going to have like an 8 to 10 PSI loss at that nozzle.

32:15
So to get the nozzle to work the best, I want to be above 30. Nozzle comparison.

32:20
Here’s where I want a non-air induction or a non-venturi nozzle versus an air induction nozzle.

32:26
Pulsing sprayers are technically a precision ag piece of equipment.

32:29
OK.

32:30
Can you plug on an air induction nozzle and make them work?

32:33
Yeah, but as you’ll notice by my term there, yeah, doesn’t really say precision, right.

32:41
So that’s why I’m not a big fan of air induction nozzles on there.

32:43
You’ll see how it doesn’t shut off very cleanly.

32:45
You get these big drooling droplets.

32:47
You know, you just don’t have the clear cut nice shut offs, the accuracy, the full spray pattern formation as well when you’re when you’re using the non-air induction nozzle.

32:57
So that’s why I tell you to avoid the air induction part.

32:59
The other thing is skip over this.

33:01
I’ve got this video to help emphasize it too.

33:03
So, this is a non-air induction and it’s kind of tough to see, but you can see those clear cut shut offs on and off.

33:09
You’ll see very little extra droplets that are in that spray.

33:13
Here’s an air induction nozzle.

33:14
It’s a TADF from Greenleaf and you can see all of that droplet just coming out of it, right?

33:19
It’s just leaking out of the air induction ports where it’s trying to suck back up in.

33:23
And then this one over here is an AITT J60, and it’s tough to see from back there, but that little hole is the air induction port and it’s shoving water back out of the air induction port on every pulse.

33:34
Waters not supposed to be in an air induction port.

33:37
OK.

33:38
So when it’s pulsing, it’s shoving it back through that system.

33:41
And again, it’s just not being operated as precisely as it should be.

33:45
Can it work?

33:45
Yes.

33:46
But is it as precise as it should be?

33:48
No.

33:48
And so I, I like to recommend against that.

33:50
So again, pulsing to maximize pulsing sprayer systems.

33:54
And the reason I bring this up real quickly too, a lot of our targeted application equipment you can basically consider as a pulsing sprayer, right?

34:02
It’s just not pulsing all the time like a PWM system is, but it’s in effect, it’s still turning on and off and you’re having these nozzles have to deal with these drastic pressure changes.

34:11
So a lot of these principles still apply.

34:13
So I like to say again, use non-air induction nozzles as much as possible.

34:18
ah, a duty cycle if you can stay above 50% so you never have skips and then higher application pressures are better as well.

34:27
Some other considerations real quick.

34:28
We already mentioned this boom height can have a drastic effect on coverage, so get it down to where your nozzle catalog tells you where it’s supposed to be at.

34:36
For most of our 110° nozzles, you’re somewhere between 20 to 25 inches or so and you can see we got better coverage than when we jacked it up higher.

34:45
OK, again, little things, but it can make a big difference.

34:48
Proper mixing is very important for setting up our applications for success.

34:53
I like to say we kind of screwed up on this nowadays on the extension front.

34:57
But the old adage of fill the tank 50 to 75% full and then add in the herbicides probably isn’t the best recommendation anymore. Simply because a lot of people now are using these induction tanks and flushing the herbicide into the the big spray tank.

35:11
Right?

35:12
Well, I get calls all the time.

35:13
Hey, my induction tank is gelled up.

35:15
What happened?

35:16
Well, how many active ingredients did you throw in at a time?

35:18
Oh, like 3.

35:20
Don’t do that.

35:21
OK, so what we have to do and what my recommendation more is now is if we’re especially if we’re using these, throw in one active ingredient at a time, flush in water, throw the next active ingredient in, flush in water.

35:33
And so I generally like to say maybe in your big tank.

35:36
Now we only start with 25% of the water and then you start flushing in your your chemicals one at a time and you have more room to get to a max tank load then.

35:45
And we should run into less issues there where we gel up a sprayer because we’re mixing concentrated chemicals together in a small tank.

35:52
OK, Other advice, always read your herbicide label.

35:56
Everybody reads your herbicide label, right?

36:00
Yes.

36:01
Listen, I’m extension nod and smile.

36:03
Make me feel good.

36:04
So I can go back to my impact report and say, yes, everybody says they’re reading their herbicide label, OK.

36:09
I will also say read it correctly.

36:15
Not like my little man Brooker here who’s reading upside down.

36:18
OK, front to back, left to right, top to bottom, read them right.

36:22
There’s a lot of good information in there to make a better application.

36:26
Football analogies.

36:27
I got to have these.

36:28
OK, this is a bad Purdue football reference so y’all will enjoy this one.

36:32
But this kind of summarises my take on on making.

36:36
You know we can do a whole lot of things right and still end up with a bad result if we don’t follow best sprayer best practices.

36:43
OK, so I’ll play this clip up front here.

36:47
We’ve got our big boys residuals, right, always doing a lot of work for weed control.

36:51
They’re holding the line, they’re making sure nobody gets to our quarterback.

36:54
Our quarterback was a strong weed management prep plan.

36:58
And you’ll notice our receiver ignoring sprayer BPs not doing so smart.

37:03
And my favorite part is the weeds just staring at us laughing.

37:08
OK, so I’ll let it play again because I was kind of fast.

37:10
But we do things right, right?

37:11
We used residuals.

37:12
We had a strong weed management plan, OK, but we ignored sprayer our best practices.

37:17
We even used the best possible herbicides in technology available.

37:21
And because we ignored some of these rules, we don’t score a touchdown and we go out the back of the end zone and the weeds laugh at us.

37:28
Don’t do that, OK?

37:30
Pay attention to the little things.

37:31
They make a big deal.

37:32
They make a big difference.

37:33
OK.

37:34
All right.

37:34
I promise I’m wrapping up shortly, Rodrigo. Integrated weed management,

37:37
I just want to highlight that part of what Rodrigo was saying too.

37:40
With any of these new technologies and making sprayers work better even from a broadcast standpoint, we have to use other strategies, OK, to moving forward waterhemp, managing it with post emergence herbicide sprays alone, yeah, we’re just going to ruin the entire system.

37:55
OK.

37:55
So we have to integrate other things.

37:57
So stuff like cover crops can be a really big benefit.

37:59
Full rate residuals can be a big benefit.

38:02
This was from some of our Indiana Soybean Alliance funded See & Spray work where we’re looking at herbicide savings and we show that if we had no cover crop, no cereal rye, but we used a full rate residual at our post timing, we could have a 50% post emergence product savings.

38:18
If we integrated cereal rye plus a full rate residual, we had 90% herbicide volume savings at the post timing and we have a whole lot less chances of finding the resistance gene because there’s less waterhemp out there.

38:32
OK.

38:32
So those pieces all tied together super important.

38:35
Also going along the lines of finding alternative uses for these technologies, we did a study trying to look at, OK, can we find some other herbicide options in non-traited soybeans since we’re going to be target applying.

38:48
OK, so can we integrate some other herbicide options?

38:51
So this is a picture of that.

38:53
This right here, this box is where we had that full rate residual with no cover crops and we had a 44% herbicide volume savings.

39:01
What we did here was we were trying to apply Liberty and Round Up Ready soybeans to kill to kill waterhemp.

39:08
We did a great job at killing soybeans that weren’t Liberty Link.

39:11
OK, so 44% savings is not an option, but what’s really cool to see this plot right next door is that other one that I just talked about that had the cereal rye cover crop plus the full rate residual where we had a 90% herbicide volume savings.

39:26
There is a lot of beans left in that plot and actually the yield was not different than our weed free check.

39:31
So, we yeah, we killed off a few beans by target applying, but we had an option to get rid of all the remaining waterhemp that we normally wouldn’t have been able to use and we didn’t cost us yield.

39:40
OK.

39:41
So again, another avenue

39:42
where these targeted applications might have a fit moving forward.

39:45
All right, so officially wrapping up with that big thank you to the Purdue Weed Science team for everything that all of our grad students and, and other faculty members and research associates do.

39:55
They’re a big help.

39:56
Thanks to all of our sponsors.

39:57
I always need to thank them.

39:58
And in true PBS fashion, I like to say thank you to viewers like you.

40:04
All right, And then finally got to have one more football reference.

40:07
And this is actually a good Purdue football reference, so I apologize in advance, but it’s against Illinois, and we all don’t like Illinois, so that’s all right.

40:14
This is how I see us being successful long term for weed management purposes, OK, including with novel technology.

40:22
So when I play the video, I always like to highlight our novel tech that we’re talking about today.

40:27
Takes all the glory, gets all the good news, causes that strip sack fumble, right?

40:31
Everybody’s praising him as the the next greatest thing, right?

40:34
The just the most awesome thing out there.

40:37
But if we don’t start clean and have full rate residuals up here, the big boys up front, right?

40:42
But we can’t get there if we don’t use integrated weed management practices, we don’t recover the fumble in the end zone and Purdue offense isn’t scoring a touchdown, folks.

40:49
OK, So we need the defense to score.

40:51
OK.

40:52
And then I also like to highlight, let me back up and I’ll just restart it, OK.

40:56
I’ve talked a lot about the little things today.

40:58
This linebacker that drops into coverage to make sure that the quarterback can’t dump it off to the tight end, those little things make a huge difference.

41:05
It allows that cornerback to get there.

41:07
OK, so you take all of those and add it all up.

41:10
And that’s how we can be successful long term with weed management.

41:12
It’s all of those pieces working together, not just one that’s going to do it on their own.

41:17
OK, All right, so with that, I’ll wrap it up so Rodrigo doesn’t, you know, get angry at me.

41:22
But thank you.

41:28
Thanks for your time.

41:29
My contact info is up here.

41:30
I’ll also be around all day, so if you have any questions or anything else, just feel free to hit me up at some point somewhere around here.

41:36
So thank you.