It's easy for Greenpeace employees in cities to talk about farming but in the real world, without pesticides we'd lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetables, and 32 percent of cereal crops.

Most farmers want to optimize razor-thin margins and protect their biggest asset, land, so they are cautious about spraying too much, but the organic process leads to startling amounts of nitrogen runoff into rivers and ground water. A study claims 31 percent of agricultural soils around the world were at high risk from pesticide pollution while the old ways of German farmers recently showed they were exposing everything to wasted chemicals. Seed treatments like neonicotinoids have gone a long way to reducing runoff but some products can only be sprayed. 

There are ways to reduce waste, like using two nozzles rather than one and products with opposing electrical charges but those are not economically realistic when there are 2.2 million family farms growing nearly all of our food and half of them only make enough profit to pay their real estate taxes.



A company has a better way; an affordable thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed which prevents 'bounce' so the droplets stick to the leaves as intended.

In their study, lab experiments using high-speed cameras showed that when they sprayed droplets with no special treatment onto a water-repelling (hydrophobic) surface similar to that of many plant leaves, the droplets initially spread out into a pancake-like disk, then rebounded back into a ball and bounced away. When the researchers coated the surface of the droplets the droplets spread out and then stayed put. The treatment improved the droplets’ “stickiness” by as much as a hundredfold.

Though different materials they used varied in their effectiveness, all of them were effective. A small amount, even .01 of something like soybean oil, led to improvement in droplets sticking to the surface. Products farmers already use in their spraying, like adjuvants, can also provide the same benefits in keeping the droplets stuck on the leaves.

Which means environmentally conservative farmers won't worry about introducing something new.

They developed a RealCoverage system to monitor spraying in real time and tests showed it has reduced pesticide costs over 30 percent. It is being deployed to 920,000 acres of crops in California, Texas, France and Italy.

The company they created, AgZen, recently raised $10 million in venture financing to support rapid commercial deployment of these technologies that can improve the control of chemical inputs into agriculture.