The Effect of New Technology on Pesticide Applications

The majority of the pesticide application research carried out in the last ten years has been centered around drift control. The activity of environmental groups and the EPA forced the chemical industry to spend a great deal of time developing methods to avoid criticism and obtain their support. This meant that most of the research dollars were allocated against drift control projects. This situation left a void in research to improve insecticide and fungicide applications. The need to control drift has indirectly resulted in analytical techniques which can be applied to insecticide and fungicide research. Research on improved insecticide and fungicide applications are beginning to come of age. The old “Squirt and look” research techniques are becoming too time consuming and expensive to be practical. For researching new chemical compounds, computers and analytical techniques will reduce the amount of field work needed to screen an application method before it is brought to market.