Graham Betts: We're at Ashley Wakefield's property in Tingarra which is halfway between Maitland and Middleton in South Australia and we're looking at the arag seletron four fold system, and I'd just like to ask Ashley why did you go to the expense and the trouble of putting this system on Ash.

Ashley Wakefield: Basically I was wanting to get smaller sections. I had always tried to get down to 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.

Graham Betts: Reliability Ashley - how is it going for reliability? because it is electrics and electronics in the past have been a bit hit-and-miss.

Ashley Wakefield: Touch wood it's been really reliable so far. I've just 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.

Graham Betts: And what speed range have you been able to achieve with this?

Ashley Wakefield: The beauty of this system because we've got the fourfold 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 manipulating pressure and also speed we can get exactly the right spray quality we want to do the job I want.

Graham Betts: So it's not be all that ends all, you can't not swap your nozzle and you've got a fertilizer nozzle on here.

Ashley Wakefield: 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.

Graham Betts: So all your systemic, contacts, soil products, residual products, you use the same nozzle combination, just vary your pressures and settings.

Ashley Wakefield: Correct, yep. So just by using lowering my maximum pressures for courser droplets and increasing the pressure for finer droplets I can manipulate all those spray qualities just by using those four nozzles.

Graham Betts: 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?

Ashley Wakefield: Probably one of the first things that came in with GPS, we knew exactly where we were in the field, followed closely by auto-steer, because of GPS obviously, so saves a lot on overlap and therefore costs, and to me the next thing along was the seletron. Because we can do each individual nozzle we're not over-spraying, so I'm not spraying any more than probably half a square metre on my property at any one time. So I think that's been a real cost saving.

Bill Gordon: The spray system we're looking at here is a three TS or three tier boom. It's one of the multi steps that are available. You can see that this particular one is fitted with air solenoids which allows to boom turn the nozzle on and off on the boom. This is fitted with 01 orifice and 015, so what this boom does it will turn these nozzles on when it gets up to a particular speed it'll switch to these and then when I get to nominated speed they'll all run together.

So the advantage in this system is it gives growers or operates a much greater speed range than say a standard single line. We can run from one to the next and then to both. Now the particular nozzle that's fitted to this one you'll see is a high-pressure air induction it's a little bit longer than the standard ones that most people would see. We're running from 01 orifice then switching to 15 then switching them all together. So with a standard machine this flow rate would be equivalent to running an 025 at 50 centimeters but the benefit is that we run this range of this nozzle than this then both together and that gives us a lot of advantage particularly when we're slowing down it'll also transition from both back to one back to the other, that helps minimize overdosing which is really good in paddocks where you have obstacles or we might have things like contours.

This quick tip where we're alternating novel sizes like this we need to plan to have the overlap or the height of the boom so the overlap is at 50 centimeters, because we have a different flow rate from there to there, we treat it like a 50 centimeter nozzle spacing and have it about 50 centimeters above the top of the stubble, but in this particular setup we get a lot of advantages. The key one is speed range. With these air valves we can also introduce factors like recirculation and boom prime, so there's a lot of advantages to operating a system like this.