Performance assessment of orchard sprayers, Part 2: Field Trials

In autumn 2009, a new three partnership project was started funded by the Agency for Innovation by Science and Technology (IWT – Flemish Government) in which an interactive and user friendly software will be developed to understand and improve the application of plant protection products in fruit orchards. The final goal of this project is to improve the distribution of plant protection products on the target, resulting in similar or better biological efficacy with fewer exceedings of residue limits and reduced off-target spray drift losses. The development of this model consist out of tree main steps, the characterization of the application machinery (Part 1), field trials to characterize application process properties like deposition and drift (Part 2), and finally the integration of these data into the CFD orchard spray model (Part 3). Later on, the model will be validated by performing field trials. This abstract describes the preliminary results of some field trials concerning spray deposit in the tree for several training systems which are used to further develop and validate the CFD orchard spray model.