corn spraying sao paulo — Corn

The land here is a patchwork of narrow terraces that a tractor cannot enter without leaving crop damage on the ridges, so the previous method was manual knapsack spraying, which was both slow and hard on the operator. A 40-litre platform with a 30-minute flight time was selected for its payload rather than its speed. The result was a 940-hectare programme covering 68 separate plots in eleven weeks, using four operators instead of nineteen. Chemical consumption per hectare dropped 22 per cent because the higher-velocity spray pattern reaches the lower leaves of the plant rather than only the canopy, which matters for corn borer control in the Brazilian summer. One operational constraint worth noting for anyone planning a similar project: the terrain blocks line-of-sight between the ground station and the aircraft, so operators had to work in 200-hectare blocks with the ground station at the highest point.