Sticky pesticides: Farmers don’t like using pesticides anymore than we like traces of them on our food. Here’s a smart way forward

It’s easy for Greenpeace employees in cities to talk about farming but in the real world, without pesticides we’d lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetables, and 32 percent of cereal crops.

Most farmers want to optimize razor-thin margins and protect their biggest asset, land, so they are cautious about spraying too much, but the organic process leads to startling amounts of nitrogen runoff into rivers and ground water.

A company [Agzen] has a better way; an affordable thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed which prevents ‘bounce’ so the droplets stick to the leaves as intended.

[T]he treatment improved the droplets’ “stickiness” by as much as a hundredfold.

[A] small amount, even .01 of something like soybean oil, led to improvement in droplets sticking to the surface. Products farmers already use in their spraying, like adjuvants, can also provide the same benefits in keeping the droplets stuck on the leaves.

Which means environmentally conservative farmers won’t worry about introducing something new.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here