Anti-splash additives for reducing pollution and increasing yield with agricultural sprays

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The off-target application of agricultural sprays is a major concern due to potential for environmental contamination with pesticides and fertilizers, as well as economic losses due to poorer crop yields. Sprays go off-tagert for two reasons: wind blowing the sprays away or not sticking to the plant. Problems with wind can be reduced by getting the nozzles closer to the plant and using larger droplets in the sprays. However, using larger droplets reduces sticking to the plant since they are more likely to splash, bounce, and roll off. Fortunately, recent work from our group, showed that adding very small amounts of polymers (about 0.1%)can achieve greater than 90% adhesion of the spray, and thereby reduce the required amount of agrochemicals by more than 25%. However, there are some challenges that need to be overcome to enable the adoption of such polymer additives. First, the most effective polymers can be difficult to dissolve in water and can be easily degraded by over mixing or chemical degradation, thus losing the functionality. In this work we aim to increase our fundamental understanding of the functionality of the polymer and develop an optimal formulation for use by farmers that does not suffer from these drawbacks.