How to Improve T&O Management with Deposition & Drift Reduction Agents
Traditionally, turf and ornamental pesticide applications are performed with standard pesticides. These out-of-the-bottle pesticides typically have inert ingredients to help their performance, but they are often not optimized for a variety of conditions. Water and pesticide mixtures are prone to drift when conditions are windy. Spray drift causes the active ingredient to spread beyond its intended area, leading to unsightly and often costly damage and an insufficient amount of actives on the target area.
Ensuring the Best Application in Turf and Ornamental Management
When spray solutions pass through small nozzle openings under high pressure, they form small droplet sizes. These tiny drops of liquid are easily picked up by air movement and do not reach the target application area. When these droplets land outside of their intended target, they can cause damage that can be costly or take a long time to restore. Droplets that drift do not have proper deposition and do not ultimately accomplish the goal of the application, which is to deliver the active ingredient to the target.
What Can You Do to Prevent Drift?
Adding a drift and deposition agent to your tank mix can reduce the potential for drift and improve deposition. Products like OFFSIDE, a drift reduction and deposition aid, optimize droplet size and spray pattern uniformity, reducing the likelihood of drift and optimizing deposition.
The video below shows the spray pattern with water (left) and water with OFFSIDE at 0.4 oz per gallon (right). Both are sprayed with an XR110015
spray nozzle at 40 PSI at 20 gallons per acre spray volume. The video shows that adding OFFSIDE to the spray leads to more consistent spray quality due to
more evenly-sized droplets. The number of small droplets that can cause drift has been reduced. The deposition result between water and OFFSIDE + Water is visible on the yellow spray card, where the dark dots show where each droplet landed. The difference seen in the actual spray in the video corresponds with the better deposition of the OFFSIDE + Water droplets on the spray card.
The Importance of Droplet Size for Drift Reduction
One of the ways to measure the potential for a tank mix to cause drift is by measuring the percentage of small droplets or fines in a spray. Droplets sized smaller than 150 µm are considered driftable fines. As the name suggests, these fines are more likely to drift, and the lower the amount of these fines in a spray, the less likely the spray will cause drift damage.
The chart shows that adding the drift reduction and deposition aid OFFSIDE™ to a glyphosate tank mix will lead to fewer fines in the spray and, therefore, less drift. Many pesticides can inherently decrease spray droplet size and adding a drift-reducing agent will lessen the chance for drift for these applications.
OFFSIDE keeps your application on target.
When making a spray application, it is crucial to ensure it is as successful as possible. Many factors determine an application’s success, including equipment, weather conditions, tank mix chemistry, and susceptibility of the target pest. One of the simplest ways to get the most out of every application is to ensure that the spray ends up in the target location by ensuring that the droplet size of the spray is optimized for landing and sticking to the target area.
A drift reduction and deposition aid, like OFFSIDE, added to each tank mix reduces the chance that the application drifts away from or bounces off the target area.
OFFSIDE: Drift Reduction Agent & Deposition Aid
- Modifies sprays to maximize droplets within the ideal size range
- Large enough to avoid drifting off target
- Small enough to avoid bouncing off the target
- Increases spray pattern accuracy and application efficacy
