Defoliation Effect on Cotton Crop by using Different Sprayers

Cotton is an important commercial crop of India which is traditionally manually harvested which is laborious and time consuming and in this contrast mechanical harvesting is most demanded operation. The mechanical harvesting is only possible when utmost defoliation of cotton was achieved. So this experiment was conducted for comparative evaluation of different sprayers viz. electrostatic (charged and uncharged state) and knapsack sprayer for shedding off leaves of cotton crop. It was observed that the electrostatic sprayer with charge state was comparatively more effective in shedding off plant leaves (60%) as compared to uncharged electrostatic sprayer (51%) and knapsack sprayer (38%) respectively at 5% level of significance. The defoliant spray was significantly effective for shedding off plant leaves but not for opening of cotton bolls during the experiments done with different sprayers.