Evaluation of Maggrow Technology for Defoliating Cotton in Mississippi and Georgia

Harvest-aids are an important input in cotton production that effect harvest efficiency as well as help preserve cotton yield and quality. Therefore, cotton growers are continuously looking for ways to improve their harvest-aid application practices to attain increased efficacy while being efficient with application volume and time. The new MagGrow technology is currently being offered in the US to be utilized on commercial boom sprayers as an add-on system to increase product coverage and efficacy while reducing the total amount of application volume used during spray applications. This technology is being evaluated across different applications, and needs an unbiased research-based evaluation to explore the potential benefits for defoliating cotton. The main objective of this research was to evaluate and compare the harvest-aid coverage and efficacy with commercial boom sprayers equipped with and without the MagGrow technology. Field-scale trials were conducted in both Mississippi and Georgia in 2020 where treatments consisted of harvest-aid applications at an application rate of 10 GPA in Mississippi, and two different application rates of 8 and 10 GPA in Georgia with and without the MagGrow system. All other factors including nozzle type, ground speed and harvest-aid product were kept consistent between the treatments. Data collection consisted of visual ratings including greenbolls (%) and open bolls (%) before application, and then defoliation (%), desiccation (%), green leaves remaining (%), and greenbolls (%) at 5 – 7 days after application. In Georgia, water sensitive paper was also placed within the crop canopy during the applications to assess droplet size and coverage. Additionally, aerial imagery was collected to detect any visual differences across the treatments at both locations. Results from the trials are currently being summarized and analyzed to determine if the MagGrow system exhibited an increased harvest-aid coverage and efficacy than the conventional application without the MagGrow system.