Page 39 - Grapevine July-August 2015

Around The Vineyard

an average of 50 gallons of water per acre to 15 gal-
lons.“Now my fill-up time is minimal,” Klopp said.
“I’m not eating up a lot of time running back and
filling up the tank every few acres.”

Ditto for Keith Roberts, senior viticulture manager
for Wente Family Estates in Greenfield, California.
“If you take a conventional sprayer and you’re filling
it five times in a day, and it takes a half-hour each
time, that’s five times the half-hour that you lose per
day,” Roberts said. “With the On Target sprayer, we
fill it up in the morning, then we fill it up at lunch
and it runs the rest of the day. “And as for coverage,
it is doing as good as or better than the convention-
al sprayers, with one-quarter the amount of water,”
Roberts said.

Roberts said that given the risks, he hesitates to
reduce fungicide rates, particularly during the peak
growing season when grapes are highly susceptible
to powdery mildew and botrytis.
He has, however, been able to reduce his use of
spreader. “We use so many parts per hundred gal-
lons, so the concentration stays the same,” he said,
“but we are using less spreader.”

Conversely, Don Hofer of Kiler Canyon Vineyard
in Paso Robles, said he has lowered fungicide inputs
considerably since switching from an air-blast to
an electrostatic sprayer. “We are using 50 percent
of the amount of chemicals we used to use, and we
were able to reduce our sprays from six per growing
season to four per growing season,” said Hofer, who
purchased an On Target sprayer in June of 2013.
“Performance has been just tremendous, beyond
my expectations,” he said. “It has saved us a lot of
money.”

Electrostatic sprayers produced by On Target Spray
Systems can best be described as the new generation
of electrostatic sprayer. The technology has been
around since the 1940s when automobile manufac-
turers began using it to paint vehicles. In the 1980s,
the agricultural community began researching its use,
and some versions of the technology have been avail-
able in spray systems since the early 1990s.

At its simplest form, the technology works by uti
lizing the law of attraction. With tiny electrostatic

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