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Old 06-17-2011, 02:45 PM
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Lil Giants Lil Giants is offline
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Default Re: Something new to rc

100ft, 103.5ft w/fenceline nozzles.

It sure is a big improvement over the 16yr old 100ft pull type, can travel nearly 3x the speed in the field & just about double speed on the road!

The greatest feature of all it is the five section auto-shutoff. Auto-steer shaved off about 10% of the acres for both seeding/spraying, I'm hoping to gain another 5% on the spray.

Continuous cropping everything came on strong in the later 90's. The Richardson Ground Squirrel (gopher) was dominant in the hayland/pastures for-ever, but 50/50 crop/fallow kept them out of the cropland. The f#@%^&ing treehuggers got our 2% strychnine banned from regular use for rodent control in 99, so the gophers got over populated in the pastures and started moving out into the crops... and why not with an unlimited food supply!

So fast forward to 07, gopher populations are out of control, crop damage in the $40-100/acre or more, holes everywhere, badgers the natural predator to the gopher & they dig holes the size of a basketball / along with the huge mound of dirt on the surface... these pull type sprayers with small 24 inch wheels to carry the booms are getting the shyt beat out of them even at 5-6mph. I use to spray @ 9.5mph.

Now with this self propel with its huge tires with its long footprint on the ground, I can drive over the holes without dropping into them. Also I can spray 3x the acres as the pull type in the same alloted time, making myself more self efficient when the weather is agreeable.

We got our strychnine back in 08, but it's not as potent as the old stuff. It still works, though I wonder at times... but then again the populations were huge a few yrs ago. And now with extremely wet weather for the past yr, getting poison out in the spring/early summer has been next to impossible. I put out many cases in 09, covered most of the farm twice, some of it three times and I do notice a reduction in populations, but worse than ever now is the badger holes everywhere.

The last couple yrs I've been doing about 15% tillage during the growing season, which means 15% less crop planted/harvested. Something I'm shopping for currently is a big field disc, as much as I can pull with my 1325 Panther Steiger, so I can till the bad areas after harvest - before the snow flies. Then maybe I can continue on with 100% cropping again. We only grow one crop yr here & the season is pretty short!

That's my plan, anyway. This yr is so wet that I only got half planted. Now I got lots of chem fallow to do, which is the biggest reason why I bought this outfit sooner than later.

I'll fill with it water this afternoon & go out & play with it some more... alot of buttons & settings to fine tune yet. In crop herbicides will likely start next week sometime.... if the sun will shine?!
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