The Stratus AirSprayer is essentially a powered paraglider — one that can carry heavier loads and stay aloft much longer than conventional drones. Photo: Supplied

The latest in aerial spraying: paragliders

The Stratus AirSprayer is different than the quadcopters and fixed-wing UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) typically associated with ag drones. Essentially, it’s a powered paraglider — one that can carry heavier loads and stay aloft much longer than conventional drones.

A close up of Ascenso’s VDR 900 (VF) tire.

New sprayer tire option pitches same weight with less pressure

Ascenso VDR900 tires promise higher road speeds, better traction

Reading Time: 2 minutes Glacier FarmMedia – Ascenso Tires’ North America VF model is making inroads in agriculture. “What’s unique is all our tires are D-speed rated (64 km/h). That’s a huge difference compared to many brands,” said the company’s Canadian sales manager Mike Massé at the London Farm Show earlier this year. “We’ve also got a unique mud breaker. It’s […] Read more



Marcel Kringe, founder and CEO and Courtney Baxter, global marketing manager, with Bushel Plus show one of the combine concaves they are marketing at Agritechnica.  Photo: John Greig

Agritechnica update: Canadian content and a John Deere update

There’s significant Canadian content at Agritechnica. Large companies like AGI and MacDon have impressive displays with significant real estate. I also happened upon the Canada pavilion, packed with companies familiar to many of us, including Honey Bee, Mankato, Schulte and Bushel Plus. The companies say that there’s value in companies from Canada banding together to […] Read more


“When you’re looking at the sprayer, how it’s physically put together in terms of the structure and how it’s operated, we want to understand how that impacts the potential for spray drift.” – Lorne Grieger, PAMI.

The role of aerodynamics when crop spraying

Air disturbance from the sprayer itself may be affecting your drift risk

Reading Time: 4 minutes Glacier FarmMedia – We’ve come a long way with sprayers. We’ve made them bigger, we’ve made them faster and with new visual technology and artificial intelligence, we’ve even made them smarter. Now, research by the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute (PAMI) along with the College of Agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan and Agrimetrix in Saskatoon […] Read more

Cutting the herbicide bill with a green-on-green system, whether from the Agrifac AiC Plus or one of its competitors, is just part of the equation. Even bigger might be using the cameras on the boom for super high-resolution field mapping, which sprayer expert Tom Wolf (inset) calls “incredibly exciting.

Could the next green revolution already be underway here?

Green-on-green spraying isn’t officially available here yet but it’s close

Reading Time: 5 minutes It wasn’t long ago that sprayers able to distinguish weeds in a growing crop were in the ‘maybe someday’ file. But that has changed, and a new green revolution may already be underway. Some Prairie farmers have bought and are using green-on-green sprayers, even though the company involved is still adapting the software to Canadian […] Read more


(Leonid Eremeychuk/iStock/Getty Images)

Weather swing prompts questions on spray water quality

Many areas have seen significant changes in water quality, which can affect the impact of herbicides

Reading Time: 2 minutes You may think you know what to expect when drawing water for the sprayer. That assumption may come at a cost, says expert Tom Wolf of Agrimetrix Research and Training. Swings in weather, from drought last year to wet this year, can affect water quality, said the author of the popular blog, Sprayers 101. “Things […] Read more

Specialty Enterprises’ AG TRK430 132-foot Millennium spray boom in operation. (Specialtyllc.net)

CNH buys spray boom manufacturing capacity

Specialty Enterprises has supplied Case IH with booms

A Wisconsin company that has supplied aluminum spray booms for Case IH sprayer product lines has been brought in-house. CNH Industrial, owner of the Case IH and New Holland brands, announced May 23 it has bought Specialty Enterprises, which is billed as North America’s biggest maker of aluminum spray booms for farm applications as well […] Read more


The back side of a standard New Holland boom retrofitted with the WEED-IT Quadro. Retailer Croplands Equipment sells the Quadro in either a retrofit kit which allows it to be installed on most types of existing sprayer booms or as a 120-foot Millennium boom.

Ready for prime time? Spot-spraying tech advancing quickly

Spot spraying in crop has a ways to go, but pre-seed burn-off may soon be commonplace


Reading Time: 5 minutes Producers have been hearing about weed-targeting spot-spraying sensors for some time, but it’s always seemed to be the stuff of science fiction. In some cases, however, the future is now while in others it’s coming quickly — it all depends on the type of sensor tech you’re interested in. Well-known spraying expert Tom Wolf separates […] Read more

Buhler Industries’ plant at Willmar, Minn., which today makes Versatile high-clearance sprayers, will take up more product lines as the company shuts its Fargo, N.D. facility. (Versatile-ag.com)

Buhler to halt Farm King manufacturing at Fargo

Work to move to company's Minnesota plant

Farm equipment maker Buhler Industries plans to gather its U.S. manufacturing work into one plant in Minnesota this summer and halt operations at nearby Fargo, N.D. The Winnipeg company, whose product lines include Versatile tractors and sprayers and Farm King application, tillage and hay equipment, said Monday it’s “optimizing” its U.S. production to boost efficiency […] Read more