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The legal requirements for sprayer inspection schemes reflect that Crop Protection has to be seen as a process, which includes the user, the application equipment, the infrastructure and the Plant Protection Product (PPP). EU directives set the legal framework for crop protection product registration and practices. For sprayers, or pesticide application equipment (PAE), the EU Directive on Sustainable Use of Pesticide (SUD), with its focus on risk reduction, requires the implementation of regular sprayer inspection and certified repeated trainings for users, advisers and stakeholders. The EU Machinery directive amendment lists the technical requirements a sprayer should fulfil which include environmental aspects for the first time. Standards are used to define technical performance requirements and how these should be tested. In Europe the CE label certifies that the PAE complies with the harmonized standards. The Crop Protection industry supports the implementation of PAE inspection schemes and supports the main objectives. These cover all aspects of operator safety, to optimize efficacy and to reduce PPP losses and reduce unintended environmental impacts. According to the relevant directive, all sprayers in use should have been tested at least once by 2016, however this has not yet been achieved. Implementation of inspection procedures are not yet well harmonized, which makes it difficult to compare tests results. Current inspections are mainly developed for field crop and bush / tree crop sprayers. Inspections for other types of PAE are generally not available, mainly because the respective technical standards are missing. TOPPS surveys in EU countries show that the need for advice on spraying is considered largely insufficient and varies significantly between EU member states. Countries with many farmers and a large variety of crops in general have higher needs for advice. The established sprayer inspection stations represent a possible opportunity to develop further competences in order to give application advice to farmers. This would require an appropriate training program for the sprayer inspectors, so that advice on e.g. better adjustment of sprayers can be further transferred by them to farmers. PAE will be a key element in further risk reduction requirements and may become more regulated and integrated in crop certification schemes. Therefore, it is necessary to follow comparable and consistent procedures which are both auditable and broadly accepted. The SPISE working groups gather experts from various countries eager to find solutions to the challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The applicability of draft test protocol for functional inspection of solid fumigant applicators has been checked. Two widespread machine models, normally used in horticultural farm of Liguria Region (north-west Italy) for broadcast soil fumigation were tested. Pre-inspection phase does not show specific problems; also the functional inspection phase, both for visual check operation -presence or not of some devices on the machines- and for test of they function if present, does not show specific hurdles. In particular the test of distribution uniformity, performed using rubber granules as blank test, give some indications on how to modify the current test protocol draft. The modification consist in change the admissible threshold; the maximum deviation of each distribution pipe, relative to the mean value, have to be varied from 10% (current draft) to 15%. Furthermore, it is suggested an alternate method to assess the distribution uniformity of rubber granules; this method considers the use of horizontal patternator fitted by grooves similar to that used to check the distribution uniformity of boom sprayers. The proposed method will facilitate the coefficient of variation (CV) calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]