New tech from Nufarm can help you use less water, save money, and better protect your crops.
Want to spend less time and water spraying forage crops this season, without compromising your yield?
It may sound too good to be true, but it is possible. You’ll get a better result using fewer resources, save money, and end up being able to fit a bit more into your day. All you have to do is ensure every spray droplet applied to your forage brassicas or fodder beet gets to where it needs to be to protect that valuable home-grown dry matter from insect pests.
As Nufarm Territory Manager Jeff Hurst explains, the key lies in taking advantage of surfactant technology designed to overcome two natural barriers to good pest control in these crops – waxy, hard to wet leaves; and plenty of nooks and crannies where small insects can hide.
“Add Flume® to your spray tank with an insecticide like Attack®, and not only will you use less water to protect the crop from a wide range of hungry pests, you won’t have to mix and refill the tank as often,” says Jeff Hurst.
“Flume®is a super spreader. It reduces the surface tension of spray droplets, flattens them out, and combines them into a thin, consistent film all over the surface of sprayed leaves, even wrapping around the underside.”
This technology is commonly used in horticultural crops, and it is very effective.
The result is better coverage and control, especially at this time of the season, when crops are often well advanced, with plenty of canopy, and pests like caterpillars of white butterfly or diamond back moth have many places to avoid the spray. Pest pressure is predicted to be high this season.
It’s a more sustainable way of doing things, too, Jeff says.
“The old way to get better coverage was to use more water in the tank, although that didn’t usually work very well on forage brassicas or fodder beet because the leaves are hard to wet. Now with Flume, you can use less water and get the same result if not better, because it literally makes Attack go further and really infiltrates into the crop.”
If you’ve previously used 200-300 litres of water/ha to improve spray coverage on forage brassicas you will need to reduce that with Flume®, even if just by a small amount, otherwise the spray mix will run off the crop and not be effective at controlling pests.
Appropriate water rates depend on the maturity of the crop, and the variety of crop being grown. A minimum of 50% water reduction is typical, but it’s important to talk to your Farm Source TSR to get the right rate for your situation.
As well as Attack®, Flume®is compatible with other key insecticide formulations like Kaiso® 50WG, DewTM 600 and Chlorpyrifos 500EC.
What if your forage crop plants are still quite small?
“When there’s not a lot of leaf area present, Contact™ Xcel surfactant is also a useful option to improve coverage of crop protection sprays,” Jeff says.
No matter whether crops are recently established or well on their way, being proactive with monitoring and surveillance goes a long way towards keeping them healthy throughout summer.
“The sooner you spot a problem with insect pests, the quicker you can make the right plan to deal with it,” Jeff says.
For more advice on helping forage brassica and fodder beet crops thrive this season, talk to talk to your local TSR or visit your Farm Source store today.
Article supplied by Nufarm.