Farmers at Janga in the West Mamprusi municipality of the Northern Region [in Ghana] are learning how to use drones and other newly introduced chemicals meant to fight an invasion of fall armyworms in the area. The intervention comes at a time when the worms have wreaked havoc on maize and rice farms.
The exercise was scheduled in response to a recent report by the Daily Graphic that the pest had resurfaced in the Nanumba South District and West Mamprusi municipality, destroying hectares of farms.
RMG Ghana Limited, an agro-input company, which organized the …. exercise …. took farmers through the use of drones, recommended time to spray, and how to apply pesticides that could help fight the worms.
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The drones sprayed a hectare of farmland within 15 minutes, compared to the manual knapsack sprayer which often took about three hours to spray the same area of land.
[J]ust 10 minutes after spraying with the new pesticide…. the worms and other insects that were feasting on the crops died and fell off.Editor’s note: This article was originally published on a foreign news website. This summary has been edited for clarity.
Read full, original article: Drones, new chemicals introduced to fight army worms