I believe this would not be the case if the controls for boom height were easier to deal with. In the current Deere and Case sprayers it looks like to me it would be nearly impossible to push the up button on the right boom while pushing the down button on the left boom. Well, maybe not impossible, but difficult to do so quickly and repeatedly all day long. I would say the position of the buttons on our old Patriot WT is much better for being able to make one boom go up while the other boom goes down. Unfortunately the WT lacks the hydrualic capacity to make it capable of doing this. Dad has recently done some modifications to it that we believe will make it much better. Another unfortunate fact is that the buttons are quite difficult to push and wear your fingers out if you are working with steep terraces all day. He has also made great strides in that department recently.

Anyways, I firmly believe that if a sprayer manufacturer were to make a very simple design on the boom height controls, most people with terraces would prefer manual control over automatic boom heigh control because they would be better at anticipating where the boom needs to be. Imagine the hydrostat handle on a Gleaner R72 combine. There are two buttons that your thumb uses (one for header height and one for reel height if I remember correctly) and your fingers don't do anything. I believe if you took that hydrostat handle and put two rockers on it (one for your index finger and one for your middle finger) you would have something far superior to any setup I've ever seen in a sprayer. You would pull the rocker switch up with your index finger and it would move the left boom up. You would push the same button down with your index finger and it would move the left boom down. Doing the same things with your middle finger would control the right boom.

If you combined that sort of a setup with good hydraulics I believe most people would not buy automatic boom height control. That is the reason you will never see anyone make a handle like that. Boom height controllers make way more money than making a slight design change to a hydrostat handle.