The basic cleaning methods for agricultural sprayers is to empty the tank on the approved crop. Fill the tank 10% with water and flush the lines. If you plan to add a tank cleaner you should do that on the second rinsing. Fill the tank mostly full on this rinse, and flush the system. For the third step repeat the initial rinse.
I bring this up because of something I learned at a meeting yesterday. Dow AgroSciences had a field day to introduce some new technology. One of the stations talked about sprayer clean out and its improtance.
John Deere conducted a study on a sprayer with a 100 foot boom and 1000 gallon tank. After spraying the tank out they took the sprayer back to the shop and drained all of the liquid. So what they collected was water that was in the pumps, low hanging lines, filters, etc. They collected this water multiple times and ended up with between 50 and 100 gallons of water still in the system.
So if you were spraying 15 gallons of water per acre you would have enough spray left in the lines to treat almost 7 acres. This is very important if moving sprayers between highly sensitive crops. and will be very important as we move to new weed resistant crops in the near future.
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