Field Testing Results of Gro-King Sprayers
By Dr. Elaine Ingham of Soil Food Web
When equipped with Gro-King spray gun’s proprietary stainless steel nozzle mechanism, both the long & short spray guns have been scientifically shown to safely deliver live microbes and fungi strands to foliage.
Throughout the summer of 2016, Dr. Elaine Ingham (Soil Food Web) field tested the Gro-King sprayer at her demonstration farm in northern California. She sprayed her bio-complete compost tea on a variety of types of foliage and then examined that foliage under a microscope. She reported seeing virtually “no damage” to the live microbes & fungi strands in her solution.
Dr. Ingham says there are three primary ways that living organisms get damaged during spraying:
- An impeller pump literally chops up the organisms as it draws solution from a tank and pushes it into a hose and nozzle.
- The opening of the spray nozzle is so tiny that it shears off the organisms appendages.
- The speed at which the organism is traveling when it hits foliage is so high that the organism is either instantly killed or fatally injured by the force of the impact. This “splat factor” can be prevented by maintaining an appropriate distance between the end of your spray gun and the leaf surface.
Gro-King spray guns produce 15 feet of horizontal throw in a full-cone pattern. The droplets on the outer edges of the pattern are larger than those on the inside of the cone which creates “drift-prevention”, ensuring that solution does not inadvertently encroach on neighboring properties.
Dr. Ingham also states that Gro-King spray guns apply a large droplet size (as close to 1,000 microns as possible) which is desirable when spraying solutions that contain live organisms. When a droplet that contains living microbes lands gently on a leaf, each droplet will roll across the leaf’s surface (foliage is never level) and the microbes will “hop off” all along the droplet’s path, creating immediate dispersion of healthy active organisms.
