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Aerial application, or what is informally referred to as crop dusting, [1] involves spraying crops with crop protection products from an agricultural aircraft. Planting certain types of seed are also included in aerial application. The specific spreading of fertilizer is also known as aerial topdressing in some countries.
An agricultural aircraft is an aircraft that has been built or converted for agricultural use – usually aerial application of pesticides (crop dusting) or fertilizer (aerial topdressing); in these roles, they are referred to as "crop dusters" or "top dressers".
A manual backpack-type sprayer Space treatment against mosquitoes using a thermal fogger Grubbs Vocational College students spraying Irish potatoes. Pesticide application is the practical way in which pesticides (including herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, or nematode control agents) are delivered to their biological targets (e.g. pest organism, crop or other plant).
Ultra-low volume (ULV) application of pesticides has been defined as spraying at a Volume Application Rate (VAR) of less than 5 L/ha for field crops or less than 50 L/ha for tree/bush crops. VARs of 0.25 – 2 L/ha are typical for aerial ULV application to forest or migratory pests.
Pesticides are widely used by farmers to control plant pests and enhance production, but chemical pesticides can also cause water quality problems. Pesticides may appear in surface water due to: direct application (e.g. aerial spraying or broadcasting over water bodies) runoff during rain storms; aerial drift (from adjacent fields). [3]: p.2–22
Pesticide application can artificially select for resistant pests. In this diagram, the first generation happens to have an insect with a heightened resistance to a pesticide (red) After pesticide application, its descendants represent a larger proportion of the population, because sensitive pests (white) have been selectively killed.
Many countries have severely limited aerial application of pesticides and other products because of environmental and public health hazards like spray drift; most notably, the European Union banned it outright with a few highly restricted exceptions in 2009, [16] effectively ending the practice in all member states.
Aerial application is the application method that most regularly causes pesticide drift, being the cause of 39% of drift incidents. [12] Aerial application in the Central Valley involves crops such as cotton and alfalfa, and these crops were sprayed with chlorpyrifos. [13]