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Opportunities for Prescription Insecticide Applications in Louisiana: Development and Evaluation of Aerial SVI

B.R. Leonard, R.D. Bagwell, J. Temple, D. Culli, D. Magoun, E. Barham, and J. Hardwick

ABSTRACT

During the past two years, researchers in Louisiana have been adapting a conventional aerial application system to one capable of applying site-specific prescription pesticide treatments. A commercial agricultural aircraft owned by Barham Brothers Aviation of Rayville, LA has been modified to include an automatic flow control unit integrated with an AG-NAV 2 on-board computer and Trimble global positioning system (GPS) unit. The software and hardware components in this system were calibrated in multiple non-pesticide trials using well-defined land areas. In 2002, an experiment compared insecticide performance in a site-specific prescription that of a full-field broadcast treatment. The prescription was based on a historical yield map and delineated between those highest (80%) and lowest (20%) yielding areas of the field. The spatially variable insecticide (SVI) treated plots excluded the lowest yielding field zones whereas the comparable broadcast treatments were applied to the entire plot area. Post-treatment samples indicated the presence of insects only in the non-treated areas of the SVI plots. However, mean seed cotton yields were not significantly different between the SVI and broadcast-treated plots. The SVI- treated plots received 20% less insecticides during the season compared to that in the broadcast-treated plots.





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Document last modified April 16, 2003