Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | Even though I'm old, I'm still learning (painfully slow sometimes) and will present a couple of obserations for what they're worth.
We noticed a couple of areas that obviously did not get the proper amount of NH3 in our corn fields. This was very evident by the color which was exactly the width of the applicator. In each case the pass on either side was nice and green.
Yesterday I checked my NH3 application maps and noticed a slight reduction in the indicated amount of NH3 applied in those two areas. In both cases the yellowing was right to the end. The indicated lower rate was not terribly low as one would have guessed by looking at the corn.
We then switched SMS to make maps based on the loads of NH3. Since I switch regions each time I switch tanks (and name the region with the tank number) this type of analysis is possible. In both cases the color change indicating a tank switch matched up exactly with the yellowing that I observed in the corn.
So what happened? I simply tried to get too many acres out of those two tanks. In the one case the lay of the land was such that I was going uphill somewhat on the end of this last pass.
I try to pride myself on not running the tanks too low but obviously I did in these two cases. When I observed the acres covered in SMS by these two tanks, the math indicated that the tanks were run quite low which is in agreement with the color of the corn.
I have applied NH3 for years with a Raven controller. Now I use the Insight to run this same equipment. Although it is never a good idea to plan on using this - the Raven will warn you of a low tank situation with a very wild and high indicated application rate and the subsequent alarm.
This is due to the fact that the speed of the turbine is varying temendously as pockets of vapor flow through the system with a low tank. This was your wakeup call to switch tanks. Like I said, this is not a good procedure but did wake you up.
The Insight apparently smoothes this out much more and you are not warned with an abnormal reading. This was with Data Smoothing set to OFF.
Lesson from all this - switch tanks sooner. I generally calculate how many acres can be safely run on a tank at the desired rate and watch the acres. This is still a good idea but a companion plan to use the Container Level feature would be useful.
I should set the container level to a conservative amount which can safely be removed from a tank even when going uphill. Then each time I switch tanks I can hit the FILL EVENT which will reset the container level to this safe amount. I could have the Container level displayed but even without it being displayed the system will warn me at the 10% level.
The container level will continue to count down even if I switch fields which will cause the acre counter to reset to zero.
Concerning Boundaries and Autoswath: In the setup page for autoswath there is an area where the operator can set the operation for outside a field boundary. The default setting is that the section will go OFF when outside a boundary. This is the proper setting 99.9% of the time.
At an Ag Leader meeting, the presenter said he didn't know why the choice of leaving the section unchanged was even available as you would never use it.
Well never say never, as I did have an unusual situation where I did use it. The field was unusual in the fact that one end did not have end rows or headlands since it butted up to another corn field of our own. This field had a boundary which was mostly correct except for this end this year. I sprayed the headland on the one end but the other end did not actually have a headland since I turned around in the adjoining field
I did not want to delete the boundary since it will be correct when the fields are planted to different crops. I wanted to use autoswath to turn the sprayer sections off for me.
The problem would be that autoswath would shut off the booms correctly on the one end but would turn them off too soon on the other end since I was passing out of the old boundary before the spraying should stop.
The solution was to change the autoswath setting to leave section unchanged. In some respects this means "don't pay any attention to the boundary".
This required that I turn the Master ON/OFF myself on the end without the headland as I turned around in the other field. Autoswath correctly controlled the booms on the end with the headlands since they had already been sprayed.
I always turn the Master OFF after autswath has shut them OFF just to guarantee no surprises should I get outside of the field limits. Later edit- I try to always shut off the Master on the ends.
My neighbor just informed me last night that apparently I didn't one time. He noticed that an arc of his soybeans are dead where my boom passed over. The Roundup in my mixture did not hurt his Rup Soybeans but the Impact that I had added apparently does. I need to check my map but I'm sure that is what happened when my boundary was slightly larger than the actual field. Once again making a new "tight" boundary or always shutting off the Master would have prevented this situation. He wasn't too excited since it was a small area and only happened once. He has another field where another neighbor used Impact and he had quite a bit of damage just due to drift.
Granted this was a very unusual situation and I need to change the setting back now while I'm thinking of it. As long as I continue to take command by shutting the Master OFF myself I should be alright anyway.
Edited by tedbear 6/28/2008 07:47
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