Precision Guidance + Precision Sprayer Control: Can It Pay?

Precision guidance and precision sprayer control have substantial promise to reduce input application overlap, thus saving chemicals, fuel, and time during the application process. In this research, we made preliminary estimates of the magnitude of the private benefits for a precision guidance system combined with automatic control of individual sprayer nozzles for agricultural sprayers (precision spraying). Hypothetical farm fields were analyzed, allowing comparison of the performance of the precision system to a traditional, non-precision system for different field shapes. An analysis of the impact of size of farm on system profitability also was explored.

We estimated that overlapped spray area could exceed 10 percent of a field’s total area when using conventional manual steer + manual sprayer control for fields with irregular shape and with obstacles like grassed waterways. If precision control of the guidance and spray processes allows accuracy to within two inches, overlap could be reduced to well under one percent of the field area. This would translate to substantial spray material cost savings (and reduced pollution) — as much as $2.50 per acre for a spray regime that costs $22/acre/year and applied in a single pass. That would double to $5.00 per acre savings if the spray material cost was doubled ($44/acre) or if two applications were required. In addition to spray material savings, the precision system required less distance to be travel due to reduced overlap, saving fuel and operator time.

The benefits of the precision spraying system will increase proportional to the cost of the spray material being applied and with fuel and operator labor costs. However, the investment costs for this system are relatively the same regardless of farm size. As a result, fixed costs of machine ownership diminish per acre as farm size increases. This means that the precision spraying system will make most sense economically for operators of larger farms who make several applications annually of relatively expensive spray materials. These estimates clearly are in alignment with the relatively rapid adoption of precision guidance systems by large farmers in the past few years.

For a complete discussion of this topic, see the following report:

http://aede.osu.edu/programs/VanBuren/pdf/AEDE-RP-0056-05.pdf

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