Ashley Wakefield, a South Australian grower with 40 years of experience, installed an Arag Celetron 4-fold spray system to reduce overlap and crop damage through individual nozzle control. The system lets him adjust water rate, droplet size, and speed by changing pressure and speed without swapping nozzles, and has run reliably for about 2 years.
Chapters
We're at Ashley Wakefield's property in Tingara, which is halfway between Maitland and Middleton in South Australia, and we're looking at the Arag Celetron 4 foal system. And just like to ask Ashley, why did you go to the expense and the trouble of putting this system on ash?
Basically because I was wanting to get smaller sections. I'd always tried to get down smaller section sizes so we didn't have as much overlap and doubling up on our chemical and causing crop damage. To me, when I saw this system, individual nozzles was to me, one of the most exciting things I've seen in the spraying industry. Just being able to turn off each individual nozzle one at a time on its own was fantastic.
And reliability. Ashley, how's it going for reliability? Because it is electrics and electrics in the past have been a bit. Bit hit and miss.
Yeah. Touch wood. It's been really reliable so far. I've had it on nearly two years now and haven't had any problems whatsoever with the electronics, so hopefully it'll keep going that way.
And what speed range have you been able to achieve with this?
The beauty of this system, because we've got the four fold, is I can vary my water rate, my speed and my droplet nozzle size without having to change any of the nozzles. We've got four nozzles there. And by manipulating pressure and also speed, we can get exactly the right spray quality. We want to do the job I want.
So it's not be all ends all. You can't not swap your nozzle and you've got a fertiliser nozzle on here.
That's correct, yeah. So if I want to go and do fertiliser spraying, I'll use the fertiliser nozzle. But for all my spray applications, I can leave those spray nozzles on there and do almost just about every job I want.
So all your systemic contacts, soil products, residual products, you use the same nozzle combination. Just vary your pressures and settings, correct?
Yep. So just by using, lowering my maximum pressures for coarser droplets and increasing the pressure for final droplets, I can manipulate all those spray qualities just by using those four nozzles.
What are the. In your farming career and you say to me, it's about 40 years. What are the things that have had the biggest influence on your farming practice?
Probably one of the first things that came in with gps, we knew exactly where we were in the field, followed closely by autosteer because of gps, obviously, so saved a lot on overlap and therefore, costs. And to me, the next thing in line was the cellotron, because we can do each individual nozzle. We're not overspraying. So I'm not spraying any, you know, any more than probably half a square meter on my property at any one time. So I think that's been a real cost saving.
