Originally Posted By: poorcountrypreacher
>>>stay away from boomless...they surge so you end up missing some spots.<<<

I think that depends on a lot of factors and what all you plan to do with it. Your unit with the boom will probably do a better job of spraying a field of corn than mine will, but I can go a lot faster if I make one pass. On planted crops, I usually lap it and I think it is still faster than a boom. The pump puts out over 4 gallons a minute, so I am gonna empty a 25 gallon tank in about 6 minutes no matter how much ground I cover.

I haven't noticed it surging, but it isn't completely consistent from one end of the spray pattern to the other. I've solved that problem by lapping it halfway. I make a pass on the field, and the next pass I throw the spray back to the center of where the ATV went on the previous trip. That makes it pretty even, good enough for me for a wildlife plot. If it were production agriculture, I'd use the big tractor sprayer. I haven't even hooked it up in several years; its so much easier to work with the atv sprayer and it does much less damage to a broadcasted crop.

But where the boomless sprayer really shines is in other types of work. For burning down deer plots with gly, I make one pass and use a pretty heavy mix and kill virtually everything and do it quickly. It takes me 3 or 4 minutes to run over a deer plot. I can also shut off one side and spray the sides of the road and get a good kill while just driving down the road.

I try to do way more than I ought to, and since I live 90 miles from the farm I have to do everything I can to save time. The boomless sprayer saves me a lot of time over one with a boom. It is also much faster than using the big sprayer on the tractor.


Good points on the boomless. Didn't consider the gallons per minute. The boomless I used did spray faster but it also surged. Not sure why. Gly is pretty cheap, but how much more do you think you waste cutting your swath in half on the second path? In other words how many gallons to spray one acre and how much gly do you use per gallon? I can cover an acre with 12-15 gallons using 3 oz. per gallon.

Now for 10 acres or more I'll have to disagree and say a 200 gallon tractor sprayer with a 40 ft. boom is much faster. In the 6 hours it took me to spray 10-12 acres, probably 2 hours was spent going to and from the field to the house to fill up the 25 gallon tank. If a tractor sprayer isn't an option you do have a good point on the boomless, but it's good to know the potential downside of surging if you get one.