Striving for change in agricultural practice

CropLife Australia and its members are committed to reducing incidents of off-target spray practices and spray drift of agricultural chemicals.

That’s why CropLife partnered with the Australian Ground Sprayers Association to produce SprayBest – a best practice guide for farmers, spray applicators and environmental land managers. The guide provides the latest advice and resources required for efficient spray application and effective spray drift management.

Crop protection products are crucial to modern integrated pest management techniques and systems. In Australia, the economic impact of weeds is estimated to be over $4.8 billion each year. It is critical that spray applicators, farmers and environmental land managers are properly equipped to use all registered crop protection products safely and responsibly.

The application of crop protection products, whether from a ground boom sprayer, knapsack or aerial platform, needs to be properly planned and carefully executed to minimise the risk of off-target chemical movement. The most common cause of off-target movement is spray drift.

Meaningful change in agricultural practice has been shown to result in improvements in on-target application efficiency and reduce the risk of pesticide drift occurring. However, management and minimisation of off-target spray drift is complex.

Stewardship programs such as SprayBest enable farmers to benefit from agricultural technologies, including innovative crop protection products and biotechnology, while ensuring the health of the environment in which they operate.

SprayBest supplements CropLife’s best practice reference guide,MyAgCHEMuse, and is an integral part of SprayPASS, the Australian Ground Sprayers Association’s stewardship program.

SprayBest is part of CropLife’s StewardshipFirst program which is a suite of whole-of-lifecycle initiatives and programs for the plant science industry’s products.

Find out more at our website croplife.org.au/spraybest