Just like your lawn in spring, we make a weed and feed pass on our wheat this time of year. Nutrien came out with their John Deere R4045 Sprayer to apply about 100lbs an acre of nitrogen via 28-0-0 and weed control through some Harmony Extra herbicide. We don’t currently own a sprayer on the farm, so we have all this type of work done by a couple of local retail locations for all our crops. With the big float tires on the R4045 you can hardly tell where the sprayer has been across the field. We have been fairly saturated in this part of the world, so it was nice to get a dry period with an application window to get this done in a timely manner. Rain followed within a couple of days along with some warmer temperatures so the wheat really woke up from its winter dormancy with a shot in the arm from the nitrogen.
With the big float tires on the R4045 you can hardly tell where the sprayer has been across the field. We have been fairly saturated in this part of the world, so it was nice to get a dry period with an application window to get this done in a timely manner. Rain followed within a couple of days along with some warmer temperatures so the wheat really woke up from its winter dormancy with a shot in the arm from the nitrogen.
If you owned a sprayer, how many times during the growth season would you use it? How do you determine the break-even point where it would make financial sense to have your own rig, rather than hiring it done?