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CO, NE | I've learned so much reading here that I thought I would share the results of my spraying this year.
I bought a used 40' Fimco sprayer last year. Nothing fancy, but good for our small operation. I have 3 boom valves a questionable (lol) regulator and one of those simple in-cab controllers with power switches and a pressure gauge. The tank is 300 gal. I'm pulling with an MF 3545.
The sprayer has a PTO pump and XR8001VS tips at 20" spacing. Finding a non-windy day can be challenging, but I've found that the weather channels hour-by-hour wind predictor on their android app is surprisingly accurate. If I need to spray and I know the wind will die down, I can prep and plan to spray when the wind does die down. I've thought about bigger tips, but I don't think the pump would support much bigger. Plus, I don't really want to go faster than I am (6mph) the way everything gets jostled around. 40' covers a lot of ground pretty quickly.
We're a wheat/fallow rotation in the panhandle, so it's a bit different farming method than those out east. We've definitely had some weed problems of various type and we're trying to get it under control. Keeping up with conventional tillage on a 125hp tractor just wasn't working as a weekend operation. Plus, we had some problems that just weren't going to go away with conventional tillage. Dad had built a broadcast sprayer to work on those, but the wind has to be just perfect for that (he lived out there, so he could wait for the wind to be perfect).
Anyway, we sprayed the fallow areas in different sections over the past few weeks. We were using 24oz/ac glyphosate and 12oz/ac 2,4-D LV6. I was mixing in 50lbs of AMS each fill of 300 gallons as it was filling. I also added 3qt of Activator 90 per 300 gallon fill. The glyphosate we were using was Mad Dog, which has a suffocant. This mix was the recommendation of the Co-op here.
One of the challenges is mixing in the AMS. I'm filling from a garden hose, so it takes a bit. After I get 100 gallons, I start slowly mixing in the AMS with the pump running. The mix valve doesn't bypass the regulator, which seems kind of weird (I'll probably change that when I change the regulator). One time I plugged up the intake with AMS while mixing it in. This last time, I plugged it up after I started going down the road. A bunch of it must have been sitting on the bottom of the tank. I still had the pump running as I was going down the road.
Once I got areas sprayed, the results have been really good. Weed and volunteer growth stopped and most of it died off within 2-3 weeks. Some of the bigger weeds were still green, but stopped growing and were not heading out. We'll run the sweeps through those fields to clean up. We must have hit the bindweed at just the right time. You could clearly see injury in the bindweed for a couple of weeks, but this last weekend it was all completely dead. The plants were brown and just broke up into dust when picked up. Other fields in the area with bindweed that weren't sprayed were thriving and flowering. I know it will take more than this to kill off these patches, but what a great start!
I think I am applying a bit heavy as the amount of liquid doesn't go as far as my calculations. I will calibrate the sprayer after I replace the regulator. However, it's all by eyesight, so there's probably some overlap as well. In all honesty, going a bit heavy doesn't disappoint me this year. I'd rather spend a few more $ and get these weeds beaten back down.
I could see a huge difference where I missed or had a plugged tip. The previous owner of this sprayer had 50 mesh screens with these tips and I switched them all out to 200 mesh last weekend.
If I can just get this figured out the rest of the way and get a set of no-till drills, I could go no-till.
I just thought I would share my results as I've learned much by reading what other people have done here. | |
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Summer Fallow Spraying Results
