ABSTRACT

Midsouth cotton producers routinely apply harvest aid chemicals to their crops in the fall to defoliate plants, promote boll opening and reduce regrowth. Blanket applications of these products across a field may be at rates too low for rank cotton and too high for senesced plants. This is especially true in variable fields with a mixture of soil types and textures and/or prominent irrigation patterns. Newly available application and spatial technologies may provide producers with the ability to make just right applications in these variable fields. GPS controlled sprayers are now commercially available that allow producers to make spatially variable chemical applications based on prescription maps generated using remotely sensed imagery of the crop. Cotton producers are interested in this new technology, but they have many questions related to system efficacy, profitability, reliability, and ease-of-use. We attempted to answer some of these questions in a 2003 field study where we compared variable rate technology and standard defoliation techniques.