Comparing two dust drift mitigation strategies to the outcomes of a conventional vacuum based precision drill using in-field validatedindoor static tests

摘要

Although seed treatment is considered as a safe pesticide application method, treated seeds can pose environmental risks when abraded pesticide-laden seed particles are expelled during sowing. Shortly after relating bee killing incidents to neonicotinoid-laden dust particles expelled by vacuum based precision maize drills, the dust drift topic received increasingly more attention from different research groups. CREA-IT and ILVO have both developed devices to mitigate the adverse effects during sowingwith vacuum based precision drills.Both mitigation strategies were coared to a conventional drill and to each other using the validated indoor dust drift setup of CREA-IT and two type of seeds, i.e. seeds coated with thiacloprid and seeds coated with a tracer. In addition, Heubach valuesand physicochemical properties of the seeds used were measured. Ground and airborne drift deposition results confirmed the important drift reduction capacities of both technologies with drift reduction values ranging from 44% up to 90% compared with theconventional technique with air deflectors. These results confirm that this static method is capable to assess the efficiency of drift reduction devices in a relatively fast and efficient way compared with field trials.