From Self propelled, to trailed, back to Self propelled sprayer

[Romeogolf]

Interesting question. The answer is yes and no but I wouldn’t swap back to a SP. However I also wouldn’t employ a contractor with a trailed either.

I considered a Amazon mounted with front tank for quite a while but in the end the probability of either the front tank or back tank top links giving away at some point knocked the idea on its head. It’s to much risk.

I agree with the top link concern, as attractive as a front rear set up is, and I haven’t completely discounted it, I struggle with the thought of all that weight on the linkage, even with linkage suspension.

 

[Lofty1984]

A good Heavy duty hyd top link should Alleviate some of that worry though ?

 

[Romeogolf]

A good Heavy duty hyd top link should Alleviate some of that worry though ?

It probably would, yes, another thing to think about. It would no doubt prove useful in many other applications to.

 

[Lofty1984]

It probably would, yes, another thing to think about. It would no doubt prove useful in many other applications to.

I wouldn’t be without mine now it makes life so much easier to be able to alter things from the cab

 

[Chae1]

Just buy a new toplink and only use it on sprayer. We've done that with drill. Have had top links go on front box on 1 pass and on 4m folding ph and coulter bar.

 

[Brisel]

The other thing to consider with the hitching on and off element is, what you’ve had to hitch off in order to hitch it on, and then the reverse.
For example, trailed drill with 4 hydraulic sets, camera connections and electrics takes longer to put on and take off than putting the sprayer on. Additionally, rear tyres need to be down to around 8psi for drilling and rolling, whereas with a full sprayer on the road I wouldn’t want less than 16 psi in the rears. Without central tyre inflation, this adds 10 minutes alone adjusting pressures, not to mention dusty and oily work with valves on the inside of the wheels!
I’m not saying it’s a huge problem, but it’s more than just the process of hitching the sprayer on in my case.

Once the tramlines are set and travelling conditions are good, you don't need to tweak tyre pressures on a tractor with a trailed beyond the operator's comfort and safe pressures for the load and speed. I can see why you'd do it with a mounted though. Frankly, if it was that regular a job I'd drill valves into the outside of the wheels to make access easier.

 

[Banana Bar]

I’m going to speak up for a Fastrac and demount system. 2500l on the deck and another 1500l on the front if you want.
Plus the ability to tow a huge bowser on the back if needed.
Speed on the road and just about every convenience of a SP with so many more advantages and a tractor to boot.
What more do you want?

If I could get that in 36 metres and 5000 lt + it would be very high up my list.

 

[Clive]

If I could get that in 36 metres and 5000 lt + it would be very high up my list.

i still have nightmares about my fastrac demount spraying experience !

 

[D14]

If I could get that in 36 metres and 5000 lt + it would be very high up my list.

You can now as there’s a proper forward control 4220 fastrac. Pictures are floating around faceache at the moment. The cab looks like it’s swivelled on a xerion. You easily get 8000 on it if it could carry it.

 

[Brisel]

i still have nightmares about my fastrac demount spraying experience !

What was wrong with it? Tip it over on a roundabout?

 

[Banana Bar]

You can now as there’s a proper forward control 4220 fastrac. Pictures are floating around faceache at the moment. The cab looks like it’s swivelled on a xerion. You easily get 8000 on it if it could carry it.

In which case I may as well buy a proper SP

 

[Spud]

If I could get that in 36 metres and 5000 lt + it would be very high up my list.

I couldn't be doing with the hassle of two tanks, for filling, emptying, looking at all day (reduced visibility) and hitching/unhitching. Now 5000/36 trailed on a fifth wheel coupling on a 4ws Fastrac? Now you're talking!

 

[Thomas Simpson]

I have generated a lot of pages on this already so will keep this somewhat brief (edit to add: and even failed at this!). We swapped from two very light SPs (Spray Ranger and Bateman) to an 8000l trailed Horsch and a bowser. Buying new you're probably talking about £285k for the current setup against £220k for the SPs. That ascribes no cost of the bowser tractor, but also assumes the Fastrac on the sprayer does nothing else. In reality the Fastrac is on a grain cart all harvest, and has done some cultivations in the autumn and spring.

I spent ages thinking and researching it, but even with all that thought you never really know what it's going to be like until you've done it and it's been interesting. To start with because I wanted to understand the new sprayer I started driving it. At first I was more than a little bit worried about what I'd done. I wasn't getting very big outputs and the headlands and corners were taking ages to do. It felt clumsy and complicated. The old set-up would have been easily able to do more acres in a day spraying than I was doing, and, although repairs bill were much higher, was costing a fair bit less.

The new set-up is complicated, there's no doubt about it. There's a lot of buttons and settings that you have to press and remember to get right, and making a tidy job does require concentration. There was quite a lot of swearing at it to start with as I had forgotten to press a button and nearly sent the thing into a hedge. Due to coronavirus and being unable to share cabs, I'm still driving it exclusively and have had much more time on it. Now it's has become much more automatic and the amount of swearing has decreased. Doing a headland with lots of awkward corners no longer fills me with dread. We obviously had a very wet winter, and such a large setup has made more ruts than we made with the other system, but I've never sprayed in as wet conditions as I did last winter and filling the sprayer half up with tyre pressures at about 13 psi I travelled much better than I was expecting.

Overall, looking back and thinking did I make the right decision, there are a few things that stand out as being particularly important:

1. Because of the tank size, we now have all chemical delivered to our main central indoor spray store which is bunded, insulated etc with a Handler mixing unit. This means all chemical filling is done in a very pleasant and safe environment, whereas before we had spray being delivered to loads of different places and filling in lots of different yards which were not that safe in the case of a spillage. This is a big positive. Because the tank takes 80ha a fill, it means so many fewer fill-ups a day. When you've got to get out 10-15 times a day to fill up, donning all the correct PPE can seem like a real faff. When it's only 3 times a day, and it's done by someone on the bowser who isn't pressured for time, things can be done very much more correctly which is safe and necessary.
2. The new set-up has a BM Air filtration system in the cab which is amazing and far exceeds nearly every other factory spec filtration set-up by a considerable margin. I like farming, but I was not prepared to risk breathing in spray which is what you get with a lot of machines. Again, this is a game changer for me. Obviously new SPs can do this, so this is not specific to at trailed. However, with a swap of filters to standard HEPA filters, the tractor is then set up for dusty cultivation work and harvest work where again you realise how much fine dust is let through into normal tractor cabs. I value my lungs a lot, so this is a big positive.
3. There are a few annoying things about the Fastrac, but the huge, huge difference compared to anything else I've driven is the comfort and the ability to travel at speed in without the engine revving flat out and some very good brakes. I have a bad lower back and again the price I'd pay not to be crippled by back pain in later life is a lot. Driving the 4220 is a dream compared to normal tractors and I would be very reluctant to go back to anything else. Ball hitch and air suspension on the sprayer makes the whole thing ride extremely well on the road. With land spread out over quite a wide area, this is a big change and makes the job less tiring.
4. Gyro steering in the sprayer is very neat and makes manoeuvrability a lot better and I think makes a trailed a lot better. That said, it is a bit of a pain having to swap modes all the time so still is quite a bit worse than the SP.
5. Having a GPS system that allows you to reverse in a straight line is absolutely key to making a trailed OK to drive in awkward fields. Letting the tractor reverse itself whilst tweaking the sprayer wheels makes reversing not too painful. Without this I think I would get quite annoyed as you would have to do those very annoying loops in the field a lot more. I want to get a camera on the back to make reversing even easier, but the GPS reverse feature is the key thing. It's easier to reverse the new set-up than it was to reverse say a tractor with a mounted fert spreader and no GPS.
6. Tyre technology and very tall tyres has made a big difference. I can fill 8000l full with fert and the tyres need to be 18 psi. Half fill it with water and I can go down to 13psi. Run 580s all year round which is working very well. Great not having to swap tyres.
8. Spending a lot of time perfecting A-B lines to miss telegraph poles has been such a good use of time. My brother and I created a spreadsheet that calculated AB lines given two telegraph poles, or a line of them, so that you perfectly threaded through the line of poles if going parallel to them didn't work with the rest of the field. In one particular field with a whole line of poles this has saved so much time. A quick few nudges of 0.3m as you near a pole along with the ability two switch nozzles on the go and slow up with pre-set cruise speeds in the tractor makes going round poles like this very easy, and you can spray so accurately right around them with the gyro steering of the sprayer than I don't think we'll need to go round with a knapsack before harvest to get the brome / wild oats. See the attached for an example.
9. Going from two sprayers to one does lose flexibility. You can't go out and spray your beans and your wheat at the same time. However, the rinse functions on the Horsch are fantastic and make cleaning out and swapping between crops so much easier with everything done from the cab.
10. 4WS on the Fastrac is a blessing and a small amount of a curse, but overall very helpful. It's more buttons to press as the Topcon won't steer properly in 4WS mode (it also won't model a trailed but steered rear implement which is annoying), but it makes backing the sprayer in corners really easy and precise. It also reduces the amount of run down crop, and makes steering the sprayer through tight gateways very much easier so that narrows the gap with the SP.

Overall, do I regret my decision? I have realised what a cheap set-up our old one was that still got the job done. Batemans depreciate so slowly that it makes them very cheap to run. If I wasn't concerned about my health and that of my sprayer drivers, and if they were much further from retirement age, and if I didn't lose sleep about being the person responsible if a big chemical spill in a yard had happened, then the old setup got great output for not much cost. But given I am worried about these things, the old system was no longer acceptable and so something had to be done. The big disadvantage which tech cannot mitigate will be travelling in tall crops. I have yet to do the flowering rape spray, and our beans look like being huge this year, so I think that will remain one big downside of the new system. Output wise, we could do 600ac a day with the other two sprayers in a good summer's day. I did 500ac and 72 cube of fert the other day in rape with the new sprayer at 400 l/ha, which would have taken ages with just the Bateman (the other SP didn't do liquid). Haven't really got going with the bowser just on pesticides with a full tank yet, but I don't think I'll be able to do much more than 600ac in a day at a push, so output is less or about the same I'd guess. A lot of people said a big sprayer and a bowser would give you huge output, but I think those nippy, small SPs were much faster at turning on headlands, faster doing the headlands, and despite going back to fill a lot got a surprising amount done.

Not sure if any of this helps, but those are my thoughts!

A really interesting post, we get a contractor to do our desiccation on the osr but one year we sprayed the osr with podstick and then went back in one filed with the roundup and was amazed how little damage there was with the trailed as the podstick pass had laid it down without too much damage for the next pass.