Regulatory compliance in agricultural field operations is a growing burden for growers, who have to juggle an increasing number of Federal, state, and local regulations, as well as partner-imposed protocols, in their everyday operations. It’s becoming increasingly likely for a grower to unknowingly find themselves out of compliance with a regulation, despite their best stewardship efforts.

This talk presents the concept (and examples) of “OK to Spray” (and more generally, “OK to Apply” and “OK to Proceed”). This ongoing work emerges from AgGateway’s SPADE project as a proposal for the industry to standardize how to represent compliance-checking data in field operations.

The goal is to make it easier for growers and other industry participants to communicate and understand  when a field operation can happen, by determining repeatedly, as necessary during product (or service) application planning, preparation, and execution, whether there are any conditions that should prevent the field operation from taking place.

a reasonable progression to talk about how a vr prescription could also factor into the adaptive sprayer technology.

An Adaptive Sprayer will continually monitor all information that is known about a prescribed application task including target, product to be applied, environmental conditions and sensitive adjacent areas.  The sprayer will anticipate needs and will actively adjust functional parameters such as boom height, spray pressure, droplet size, machine travel speed and path to ensure optimum spray characteristic at the time of spray release. To fully realize benefits of an Adaptive Sprayer, industry and agencies must agree on risk mitigation, the capabilities of the controlled parameters, and the integrity of verification protocols.  Consensus standards and organizational alignment will be central to accomplishing this work.