Improving Sprayer Efficiency

Farmers are spending 33% of their time in the sprayer idling, 22% in transport and only about 45% of their time actually spraying.

That from Tom Wolf from Agrimetrix Research and Training, who was sharing some interesting stats from John Deere.

Wolf feels farmers should be looking at ways to increase their time and efficiency in the sprayer.

“The first step really is to do an accounting," he said. "We want to know how are you spending your time. How long does it take you to fill the sprayer, to clean the sprayer, or enter some records? Most of the time we pull into the field and the first thing we need to do is get the monitor set up.”

He notes it’s a farmer’s responsibility to improve their spraying operations so that the non-farming public can have faith in stewardship practices.

Farmers want to make sure they are not causing spray drift or contamination of water sources when cleaning out the sprayer.

Wolf says new technology coming out means farmers will be able to move to site-specific spraying. Some of the new artificial intelligence technology is able to detect weeds, disease, insects as well as even the nutrient status of your plants through a phone app or drone imagery.