crop-dusting

3 4.6

Spraying crops from a low-flying plane with chemicals to kill pests or help them grow

noun
/ˈkrɒpˌdʌstɪŋ/

Specialized

: fumigación aérea

In bad years, the years of the corn mites, he flew a crop-dusting biplane to make a little extra cash.
crop-dusting plane

Examples

The crop-dusting service has become essential for large agricultural operations.
Another year without water would also impact the businesses built around the rice crop, from storage to crop dusting.

Blog text (11)
"When I was a boy," he said, "I went on a trip with my folks and saw a crop-dusting plane fall right out of the sky."

Fiction book (1995)
Two months of crop dusting outside of Fresno.

Air America (1990)
I'll be busy crop dusting in the Super Cub rest of the summer.

Sully (2016)
In fungicide application trials at the outset of the epidemic, researchers clearly hoped that aerial crop dusting would prove the most effective.

Academic text (2002)
Farmers rely on crop-dusting to protect their fields from pests and diseases.
He watched the crop-dusting plane fly low over the fields, spraying fertilizers.

Synonyms

spraying

vscrop-dusting

19 2.1

Putting liquid into small drops over an area using a sprayer

is carried out from an aircraft at low altitude over agricultural fields

How Aerial

crop-dusting

Specialized

3 4.6

to spray

209 1.0

Surface Forms

crop-dusting singular

crop-dustings plural

Morphology

crop-dusting = crop-dust (transparent) = crop + dust + ing

Formed from the verb 'crop-dust' (crop + dust) with the gerundive '-ing'; the meaning is directly derivable from its parts.

Etymology

Crop-dusting is an easy compound: crop means 'plants grown for food' and dusting comes from the idea of putting a 'fine dust' over something. Early planes scattered powders or sprays that looked like dust over fields, so crop-dusting now means spraying crops from a plane to protect or feed them.