Abundant Harvests: A Agricultural Blog

If you're a crop farmer, here are some important reasons why you should use a pesticide residue testing service very regularly.

It will help you to finetune your pesticide dosages

Having a pesticide residue testing company regularly evaluate samples of the crops you've treated with pesticides could make the process of finetuning your pesticide dosages much easier. Getting the dosing right can be challenging, as you need to find each crop's sweet spot; that is, the point at which the crop is being treated with just enough pesticides to protect it from the pests that are attracted to it, without adding so much of these chemicals that you end up getting too close to the maximum legal dosages or negatively affecting the crop's flavours and textures.

This 'sweet spot' may also change throughout the year, as some crops may only attract specific pests at certain times of the year and so may require higher dosages of pesticides at these times than during the rest of the year.

If you have the pesticide residue levels of your crops regularly checked, the data from this testing will—when you look at it alongside your own assessment of the quality of the crops that you applied pesticides to—enable you to work out the effects of your pesticide usage throughout each season and determine if you need to finetune it.

If for instance, you observe that the flavour of this year's pineapple crop is not as good as last year's and the test results show that there were higher levels of pesticide residue on this crop this year, then you might need to reduce the dosage slightly next year. Conversely, if you observed that a lot of your potato crop was damaged by pests and the test results indicate extremely low levels of pesticide residue on these vegetables, you might then decide to use a higher dose of pesticide on your potatoes next year.

It will eliminate the risk of you incurring pesticide residue-related fines

There are many uncontrollable factors (such as the weather) that can adversely affect your farm's profits. However, one expense that you can easily avoid, by using a testing service like this, is a fine related to exceeding the maximum legal dosages of pesticides on your crops.

Putting too many pesticides on your crops and leaving them coated with unsafe levels of pesticide residue could easily happen if you're not regularly receiving feedback from a testing company, that tells you the current quantity of pesticide on your crops. If you don't know, for example, that there is already a substantial amount of pesticide residue on your banana crop, you might end up treating them with more chemicals and leaving them with a residue level that is far beyond the legal limit, which might then result in you getting fined.