New technology out of MIT makes pesticides stick to plant leaves | AGDAILYReducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers — includi...

Published on by

New technology out of MIT makes pesticides stick to plant leaves | AGDAILYReducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers — includi...
New technology out of MIT makes pesticides stick to plant leaves | AGDAILYReducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers — including fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides — could cut down the amount of runoff that ends up in the environment while at the same time reducing farmers’ costs and perhaps even enhancing their productivity. A classic win-win-win.

A team of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a spinoff company they launched has developed a system to do just that. Their technology adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, greatly reducing their tendency to bounce off leaves and end up wasted on the ground. Instead, the coated droplets stick to the leaves as intended.

The research is described today in the journal Soft Matter, in a paper by recent MIT Ph.D. alumni Vishnu Jayaprakash and Sreedath Panat, graduate student Simon Rufer, and MIT professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.

A recent study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetable, and 32 percent of cereal production. Despite their importance, a lack of technology that monitors and optimizes sprays has forced farmers to rely on personal experience and rules of thumb to decide how to apply these chemicals. As a result, these chemicals tend to be over-sprayed, leading to runoff and chemicals ending up in waterways or building up in the soil.

Attached link

https://www.agdaily.com/crops/technology-mit-makes-pesticides-stick-to-plant-leaves

Taxonomy