Sprayers101 Archive
Search our archive of expert-written, data-driven analysis of spraying techniques, equipment, strategies, and more.
Crop-Adapted Spraying in Highbush Blueberry: Ten years of pesticide savings
A 15-acre highbush blueberry operation in southern Ontario reduced annual spray volume by an average of 70.5% and pesticide costs by 63% without compromising…
Spray Window – Can you plan a spray week?
Plan the day. Weigh the risks. Finish the job. Spray Window is a strategy game about spray planning. You have one sprayer and six…
How Much Pesticide in the Tank?
Sprayer math can be intimidating, but the effort gives solid value. When combined with a calibrated sprayer you reap the following benefits: There are…
Determining Airblast Travel Speed – The “Air Displacements” Method
What is the “right” speed to drive when spraying? Airblast sprayer operators must know their average travel speed to calculate how much pesticide and…
Improve your Drone Spraying Productivity
Drone operational settings such as capacity, speed, and swath width are useful figures for calculating productivity, but they only describe the airborne portion of…
Airblast Productivity and Work Rate Calculator
There are many factors that affect the work rate of an airblast application. If an operator can improve their work rate, without compromising spray…
Calibrating a Plot Sprayer for Airblast Crops
The calibration of handheld plot sprayers is an important part of agricultural research, and this article already covers all the bases… as long as…
Sprayer Math for Banded Applications
Where crops are planted in rows, growers can save on chemical costs and reduce potentially wasted spray by performing banded applications. A banded application…
The Ultimate Unit Conversion Tool
Canada, like most of the world, is officially Metric. America operates using the US Imperial system. It sounds very cut and dried, doesn’t it? However,…
Greenhouse Foggers
Greenhouse application equipment spans from the humble squirt bottle, to gas-powered foggers, to robots equipped with hydraulic vertical booms. The variety of spray equipment…
Airblast Calibration – Clearing up Confusion
“Sprayer calibration is an important part of any crop protection program.” Everyone says so, so it must be important. But what exactly are they…
Drone-based perimeter-spraying for Colorado potato beetle
Colorado potato beetle (or CPB) is one of the most destructive insect pests in potato production. Heavy infestations of CPB can defoliate potato fields…
OrchardMAX 2.0
OrchardMAX won the 2016 Canadian Agri-Marketing Association’s “Certificate of Merit” in the Mobile Apps Category. OrchardMAX is a free decision-support tool that helps apple growers match…
What is Spray Quality, Part 4 – An Important Change in S572.3 and ISO25358
A new version of standard ASABE S572.3 (adopted 2020) and its international equivalent, ISO 25358 (adopted 2018) addresses a limitation of the previous standards.…
What is Spray Quality, Part 3 – The Evolution of Standards
When scientists with laser droplet sizing instruments compared their results with other labs using the same nozzles, the numbers didn’t agree exactly. Laser equipment…
Canadian Spray Drone Label Search
On June 10, 2026 the Pesticides Regulatory Directorate (PRD, formerly PMRA) permitted the use of drones for pesticides registered to be applied by air…
Florescent Dyes for Spray Coverage Evaluation Part 2
In 2025 I ran a comparison between five florescent dyes and three UV lamps to determine which combination worked best for tracing spray deposition.…
What is Spray Quality, Part 2 – Describing Sprays
Hydraulic atomizers comprise the majority of agricultural nozzles. They work by forcing a liquid through an orifice, resulting in a liquid sheet that is…
What is Spray Quality, Part 1 – Measuring Droplet Size
It’s often been said that droplet size is the most important factor governing spray operation success. Both spray drift and pesticide efficacy depend to…
How to Calibrate a Drone – Swath Width Calculation
Calibration is a fundamental step in any spray application. To apply the correct product rate, we need to know how much liquid per unit…
Sprayer Productivity for Smaller Scales
Travel is an amazing teacher. It exposes assumptions and replaces them with real life experiences. On a recent trip to New Zealand, I learned…
Product Failure or Sprayer Contamination? A Case Study
It’s unfortunate, but every year we encounter a few instances of mysterious crop injury following an application. Was it a product formulation issue? Was…
We Need Better Drift Control Technologies
Sprayer manufacturers have all but offloaded the entire responsibility for drift management to the sprayer nozzle. It’s asking too much. Sprayers have changed a…
Increase Sprayer Productivity Without Driving Faster
Timing trumps most things in crop protection. A great spray applied at the wrong time isn’t nearly as valuable as a mediocre spray at…
Assessing wheat head coverage from Defy 3D and 3D Ninety nozzles
We’ve been here before, haven’t we? I could rehash the explanation of why wheat head coverage is important, and define the variables involved, but…