LCDC - Farm Family Health Vol. What s happening at Ridgetown College Looking at better ways to apply pesticides There may be better ways to get droplets of pesticide to stick to the right plants, and Michael Crutchley is looking for them. Crutchley works at the Ridgetown College of Agricultural Technology, a southwestern Ontario institution run by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food.
Drift wastes pesticide and can harm the environment.
He is investigating how sizes of pesticide droplets affect drift. We ve known for a long time that droplet size is important, Crutchley explains. The trick is determining how the properties of different plants figure into the equation. Pesticides will adhere differently to fuzzy fruits than to smooth ones, for example. Last summer, Crutchley began his tests with potatoes and tomatoes.