How to prevent citrus greening disease in navel oranges? Drones lend a hand in Shuangyuan Township, Anyuan County, Jiangxi

Ganzhou, Jiangxi (China Jiangxi Network) - Correspondent Liu Rongqing reports: “Spraying pesticide by drone is just so fast. The workload that normally takes two days with hired workers to spray pesticide was completed by a drone in just one and a half hours,” said Liu Chongliang, a large-scale navel orange grower, happily to our reporter while watching the drone.

On January 16, the Fruit Technology Station of Shuangyuan Township in Anyuan County, together with the County Fruit Industry Bureau, invited Jiangxi Yufeng Intelligent Agriculture Technology Co., Ltd. to carry out drone pesticide spraying operations to prevent and control citrus greening disease. In the contiguous orchards of Shuangyuan Township, workers could be seen mixing different pesticides in proportion and loading them into the drone's pesticide tank. The drone, fully loaded with pesticide, circled back and forth over the orchards, spraying pesticide in an orderly, precise and three-dimensional manner with full coverage, killing the Asian citrus psyllid, an important transmission vector of citrus greening disease.

It is understood that the township adopted a combination of drone operations and manual pesticide spraying by the citrus greening disease prevention and control service team to prevent and control citrus greening disease, focusing on 3 navel orange and citrus demonstration areas of about 250 mu of navel orange and citrus orchards, carrying out concentrated and contiguous unified prevention and control actions against the Asian citrus psyllid, so as to carry out large-scale unified control of the Asian citrus psyllid during the critical period of fruit tree shoot sprouting, cut off the transmission route of the citrus greening disease epidemic, improve the effectiveness of epidemic control, and provide a guarantee for a bumper harvest of the navel orange industry.