By Lauren Quinn
Drones can now detect subtle soybean canopy damage from dicamba at one ten-thousandth of the herbicide's label rate—simulating vapor drift—eight days after application. This advancement in remote sensing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides a science-based tool to accurately detect and report crop damage at the field scale, reducing human error and bias.
It's a tool Aaron Hager has been calling for since dicamba-tolerant soybeans—and the accompanying surge in dicamba use and off-target damage—arrived on the scene in 2016.
"We would have an annual teleconference with the Environmental Protection Agency, where they would ask how extensive the damage was and whether their label modifications were making a difference. They were relying on pesticide misuse complaints, but there are a lot of factors going into whether someone makes a complaint," said Hager, professor in the Department of Crop Sciences and an Illinois Extension Specialist; both units are part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.
"On the last call we did in 2020, we still didn't have a way to quantify the magnitude of what was really happening," he said. "Now we do."
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