How Water Quality Can Impact the Performance of your Applications

Effective spray applications require attention to many factors that influence your product’s performance, like label instructions, equipment calibration, and application timing. When it comes to preparing to spray a field, the
quality of the water used in the spray tank is often overlooked. Poor water quality can drastically impact and alter the outcome of a spray, despite following all the other necessary recommendations for your application.

Water Quality

Water quality refers to the cleanliness and chemical composition of water. Testing your water and understanding the results are crucial to effective sprays. Here are four main water quality indicators related to application performance:

1. pH: In most cases, when the pH value ranges between 4 and 7 it is considered acceptable, but some products have specific pH needs to dissolve properly. Label directions are important, sometimes calling for specific adjuvants to adjust the water’s pH prior to adding pesticide. Some pesticides, particularly insecticides, can break down rapidly in higher pH water, and acidification of the water to a pH between 4 and 6 is ideal.
2. Water Hardness: Water hardness is caused by positively charged minerals, primarily calcium, magnesium, sodium, and/ or iron. These cations can bind other products in a spray tank reducing their performance. By reducing antagonism in the tank, you help prevent nutrients from being bound together or with the spray water
3. Bicarbonate: Sometimes referred to as alkalinity, the bicarbonate ion can inhibit activity of a spray solution and make some products difficult to mix. Antagonisms caused by bicarbonates depend on the presence of other ions such as sodium and calcium. Products with chelating and complexing organic acids strongly protect the nutrients in the spray water from being bound by other elements in the water.
4. Cleanliness / Turbidity: Water can contain suspended solids such as clay. This can be the case especially when surface water is the source for applications. Herbicides like glyphosate and diquat are sensitive to this, as these chemicals are readily absorbed into soil particles, and turbid water can reduce their effectiveness. This is also why dust generated by the sprayer can reduce these herbicides’ performance.

Solutions

To mitigate poor water quality for your spray mix, the first step should always be to address the impurities at the water source by providing treatment at the well or reservoir. FBSciences has a range of solutions that aid in the compatibility of your spray mix, along with increasing the coverage, dispersion, and uptake of nutrients in the tank.

FBS Harmony™

FBS Harmony™ is a citric acid-based compatibility agent specifically designed to lower the pH of tank mixes to achieve ideal compatibility among nutrients and crop protection products. Additionally, FBS Harmony can be utilized to help correct issues caused by hard water when blended with fertilizers. FBS Harmony enables products to mix in tanks without forming precipitates. These precipitates often tie up the valuable added nutrients making them unavailable to plants and eventually cause clogs in the lines and nozzles. By lowering the pH of the mixing water and encapsulating minerals early on, FBS Harmony prevents these tie-ups in the tank, enhancing the efficacy of the overall spray solution.

Product Benefits:

• Improves the compatibility of many fertilizers and FBS nutrient products with each other
• Helps adjust tank mixes to ideal pH for optimum uptake by plants
• Prevents plugging of spray nozzles or sediments in fertilizer tanks
• Enhances the uptake and internal translocation of nutrients

Transit Foliar®

Transit Foliar®, FBSciences’ foliar-applied flagship biostimulant product, is built with our proprietary biostimulant technology FBS Transit®, designed to promote the rapid absorption and translocation of nutrients within the plant. It is specially formulated with surface wetting and deposition agents to ensure product adherence and even coverage of foliar applications. Transit Foliar is formulated to provide several benefits to the effectiveness of foliar sprays including:

Product Benefits:

• Effective coverage of the leaf surface
• Good deposition of the spray droplets on the leaf
• Wetting of the nutrient so it is available for a longer period
• Stomatal penetration to get nutrients into the plant
• Reduced limits at the membrane for absorption
• Cell to cell movement for translocation
• Movement into the conducting tissue including from old tissue to new tissue