Article by Edwin Guillermo Muñoz Cabello
Introduction
Population growth in recent years has led to the need to implement new tools, techniques, and crop management practices to meet the world’s basic food needs. Therefore, proper management of nutrition, pests, and diseases becomes crucial to ensure the yields necessary to achieve this goal.
Mexico is one of the countries with the greatest biodiversity in the world, as well as diverse climatic conditions that make it a producer of a vast variety of crops; therefore, it is necessary to ensure applications against adverse factors that could hinder the potential and yield of the crops to be produced.
Factors influencing the success and efficacy of an agricultural application
Within the management of agricultural applications, in most cases, the importance of doing so efficiently goes unnoticed, trying to control the adverse factors that are within our hands.
Many times, a control effect is generated in the applications, so the loss and the potential for improvement are not visible if done properly, considering the factors we can control when making the application.
For an application to be efficient and fully utilized, it must be considered controlled, uniform, and well-utilized. In this way, we can achieve a lower environmental impact (if any), water savings, work efficiency, less loss of molecules through evapotranspiration, and proper control of pests and diseases in the crop we are treating.
When making agricultural applications, we are exposed to various factors that can impact efficiency, but we can control some of them to try to make the most of the application, to achieve our goal, which is: to place the appropriate dose of agricultural product at the necessary and required point for its control.
There are some steps to follow to minimize the loss of application molecules in crops; by following them properly, we can guarantee a good application and therefore the percentage of control increases, which leads us to achieve good agricultural practices.
STEPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL APPLICATION
1. Environmental conditions
Checking the weather every day during our agricultural tours gives us a parameter of the real conditions of the day, so we must know:
Temperature: Early morning or afternoon hours (below 86 °F) reduce the evapotranspiration of water droplets. Knowing the humidity is also important, as it reduces plant transpiration and its absorption. An optimal range is 50-55%.
Wind: Gusts greater than 9 mph increase the risk of application drift at the site where we are applying.
2. Know the causal agent to be controlled
Efficient and random monitoring throughout the production plots provides us with information regarding the threshold or percentage of infection in the plant, as well as the causal agent. In this way, we can choose the necessary product for control.
3. Calibration and proper use of agricultural equipment
Proper calibration of the tractor and backpack sprayer is vital to ensure we are covering the applied area with the necessary water volume. BUMA (official certification by SENASICA in Mexico)training is a highly important tool to achieve the correct use of agricultural equipment.
4. Correct dose of the agricultural product
Reading the label, knowing the active ingredient, type of formulation, and recommended dose of an agricultural product provides us with vital information to make the correct choice according to the causal agent detected in the previous steps.
5. Compatibility of products to be used
There is a compatibility chart for agricultural products, so it is important to know it to make a proper tank mix, if necessary. Many times, mixing incompatible products minimizes the control effect and can cause clogging in the nozzles of our application equipment. Using the correct water volume is also of utmost importance, so it becomes important to know the phenology of our crop.
Conclusion
There are different factors that can affect the efficacy of our applications; however, there are some of them that we can control and, if done correctly, minimize the margin of error in the application.
Reading labels, checking the weather, inspecting application equipment, and knowing the correct product mixtures can ensure a successful application and contribute to adequate crop yield.