BrownfieldAgNews reports:
A professor of weed science at the University of Illinois says advancements in remote sensing technology can now allow drones to detect subtle dicamba damage in soybeans.
Aaron Hager says it’s a needed tool that can help determine the impacts of off-target movement of the herbicide.
“We’ve seen instances where exposure has taken place up to three weeks before any symptoms are noticeable.” He says, “So now we have a much more reliable system to detect exposure in as little as about 8 days after the exposure has taken place.”
He tells Brownfield the system can detect dicamba canopy damage from levels similar to spray drift down to one ten-thousandth of the herbicide’s label rate, simulating volatilized vapor drift.
“Any given growing season, the question is not really whether or not we’re going to see sensitive soybean response to dicamba.” He says, “The real question should be how extensive will it be in that growing season? And we never really, really know for sure until we get roughly toward the end of July.”
Hager says the next step in the research is to scale up the process using satellite and historical data to see how widespread off-target movement of the chemical has been in the past.
“We could look at the number of complaints that were filed with the State Departments of Agriculture, but we’ve argued for a long time that really doesn’t give you the entire picture.” He says, “Now, I think we could introduce a tool to really get a better estimate on what the extent of this off-target movement is, potentially modifying labels a little bit to try to preclude that from occurring at such a large scale in the future.”
Hager says the tool could also be tuned in the future to detect dicamba damage in other sensitive species, like trees and shrubs.
