Dust drift during sowing of sugar beet: Part 1 – Dust properties and sowing equipment

Although often considered as a safe pesticide application method, treated seeds can pose environmental risks, e.g. when abraded particles are expelled during seed drilling. Shortly after bee poisoning incidents related to neonicotinoid-laden dust particles emitted by vacuum-based precision drills, this dust drift topic received increasingly more attention. Since 2011, the ILVO-KU Leuven consortium has tried to shed more light on the phenomenon, using an integrated experimental and modelling approach (Nuyttens et al., 2013, Devarrewaere et al., 2018; Foqué et al., 2017a, 2018). The ultimate goal was to develop a simulation model capable of predicting the effect of seed species, environmental conditions and seed drill design and settings on dust drift in field conditions.
In 2016, a follow-up research project was launched in collaboration with two new partners, SSAU and STISSC. In the first year of this collaboration, KU Leuven’s dust drift model (Devarrewaere et al., 2018) was used to simulate the conditions and predict the results of some sugar beet field trial (done in 2014–2015). In this paper, the focus is on the physicochemical data collected, dust characteristics and the beet dust emission rate for different driller types that were collected as an input for the updated model (Gruyters et
al., 2020).