1Department of Farm Machinery and Power Engineering, College of Agricultural Sciences, UAS Campus, Raichur - 584 104, Karnataka, India
2Department of Entomology, College of Agriculture Science, UAS, Raichur - 584 104, Karnataka, India
ICAR-National Institute on Natural Fibre Engineering and Technology, Kolkata - 700 040, West Bengal, India
*Corresponding author's E-mail: nagesha.kumar88@gmail.com
Online published on 17 February, 2022.
An experiment was conducted to study the deposition characteristics and biological efficacy of some commonly used sprayers like manual gun sprayer, automatic gun sprayer and tractor operated boom sprayer to control some commonly found pests (leaf hopper and aphids) in cotton crop. Spray droplets were collected on water sensitive paper and analysed using DepositScan software to determine the size of droplets and droplet density. The field trials showed that, tractor operated boom sprayer provided better droplet deposition on the upper and underside of leaves with the largest droplet VMD (224 μm) and higher droplet densities (107.2 no's/cm2). However, its operating cost (Rs. 250.5/h) was higher than any of the other sprayers. The automatic gun sprayer produced more droplet densities and small droplets size (VMD) when compared to a manual gun sprayer. In the present study, tractor operated boom sprayer gave significantly better aphids (83.42%) and leaf hopper (85.61%) control than the gun sprayers. The least effective treatment was with the manual gun sprayer had 72.36 and 67.28% population reduction of leaf hopper and aphids.
Biological efficacy, Droplet density, Droplet size, Leaf hopper and aphids
