Living The Easy Litter Life: Part I

Spray tips to make living the Litter Life easier

While Litter Life's easy to apply liquid formula can be applied a number of ways from a pump up hand sprayer to large coverage high volume spray rigs, there is one thing that I believe all farmers want to do, save time.  In all honesty I wish I didn't have to spray anything, but since I do, I choose Litter Life!  When I first started to use litter life I started out by using my herbicide sprayer that is similar to what many farms would use to spray pastures.  Like most of us who are involved in Agriculture,  I am always looking for a more efficient, less expensive, better way of doing things.  It didn't take long to realize that I could make my Litter Life a little easier by doing a few simple things.  While these tips may not directly apply to every operation, the principles can be used in every set up.  

1.  Use what you have!  

I built a spray rig just for my litter life.  I had a large tank and an old boat trailer.  They just seemed to want to be friends.

It didn't take much engineering to mount the tank onto the trailer frame.  I did reinforce the axle and frame in a few places but your spray tank doesn't have to be this large.  

Many farms already have some nice spray setups to spray disinfectants and pressure wash with.  These work fine, but can often be tweaked to make spraying litter life a little easier.  

GO BOOMLESS

Many of these spray rigs are equipped with a boomless nozzle setup.  If you are not using a boomless setup to spray with, then I would start looking into building one.  Within a poultry house booms can be very aggravating. It normally only requires a T pipe fitting, a nipple, a spray tip and some simple plumbing skills. The tips that I prefer are Hamilton nozzle tips.  They can be purchased for about $25 each from many farm supply stores.  

VOLUME IS A TRUE TIME SAVER

Most sprayers are setup to deliver a specific droplet size.  If you are applying herbicide, fungicide, or certain pesticides, then droplet size is key.  With Litter Life, we just need it to be spread fairly evenly over the entire house.  VOLUME, VOLUME, VOLUME.  My first time of spraying took over 2 hours per house (40,000 sq ft).  My herbicide sprayer was simply not designed to deliver 200 gallons in a short amount of time.  I changed tips to the largest flood tip that my local farm supply had and saved about 15 minutes per house.  Boo, not good enough.  That's when I decided to build my own boomless sprayer to deliver product at a higher volume thus saving time.  

This is a double nozzle setup.  The tips are offset so the spray patterns do not hit each other.  These tips come from the factory with different volume sizing.  

Even with the #20 on 60psi a nozzle should put out 7.1 gallons per minute.    Again BOO, not good enough when I have to spray 200gallons per house. 

The Hamilton nozzles have 2 screws so you can adjust it from 90 degree spray to 180 degree. Simply remove the plates and it exposes the orifice.  A drill bit through the brass orifice was an easy solution to making what started out as a 2 hour per house task into about 10 minutes of spray time in each 40,000 sq. ft. house. 

This also eliminates multiple passes and cuts down on having to drive back over an area that has been sprayed.  If you drive over the litter you have just sprayed, it will often stick to the tires of your tractor and leave stripes of untreated litter making it harder for the product to work.  

Litter Life has made my life better in several ways and I hope these tips will help to make your Litter Life a little better.

JEJ