CRAIK, Sask. – When Rick Wildfong bought a new sprayer in 2001, he needed to upgrade his water delivery system as well.
“The old sprayer was a Bourgault with a bottom fill and it took too long. We bought this new Flexi-Coil and it has a 1,200 gallon tank, so we needed to fill it faster,” said Wildfong, who farms near Craik, Sask.
Wildfong uses three large plastic water tanks mounted on a 48 foot flatbed trailer. To eliminate the need to wrestle with a long three inch hose, he decided to add a boom to the side of the trailer. It took about a month to build.
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“The boom is made up of four inch square tubing, 3/16 thick. It goes up 10 feet, then goes out 34 feet. We had Russell Steel design the trusses for it, on a truss rafter principle,” said Wildfong.
Wildfong laid out all the pieces on his shop floor and welded the boom together. Then he designed and built a hinge to make it swing smoothly.
It sits on a piece of 3.5 inch solid shaft about four feet long. The shaft goes up into the four by four tubing about three feet, with a foot sticking out the end.
“We made a receptacle in the floor of the trailer with a couple of half inch plates, 12 inches in diameter. We put a bunch of grease nipples in it and it swings in and out pretty easy. The top plate is welded to the main shaft, while the bottom plate is fixed to the deck.”
The trailer uses a three inch Honda pump to deliver chemical and water to the sprayer. From the pump outlet, a three inch hose goes up to the top of the boom, then makes a 90 degree turn with a steel elbow. The hose travels the length of the boom inside the top square tube, then exits at the end to fill the sprayer.
Wildfong added a three foot length of flexible hose at the end of the boom to help direct water into the sprayer tank. When not in use, it swings back alongside the trailer.
“It’s mounted about 10 feet from the back end of the trailer and it swings forward into a rest. There’s a flat iron keeper about 12 inches long and three inches wide with a little handle on it. It pivots at the top of the bolt. You swivel it up, put the boom into its rest and drop the keeper down to keep the boom in,” said Wildfong.
Three inch lines from each tank flow into a main line, with dual filters located before the pump.
“The filters are about two feet upstream from the intake side of the pump. All the big tanks feed into the main hose, the main hose gets the double filter treatment and it goes into the pump,” he said.
“They told us to put those on the suction side of the pump and so far it’s worked OK. You can sure tell when the filters get dirty; it slows your flow down. We don’t usually have trouble with our filters until about June 20, when the algae starts to grow in our dugouts and in the tanks.”
Wildfong has a Chem Handler on the trailer for when he’s using little jugs. Otherwise he uses 500 litre or 1,000 litre shuttles plumbed directly into the line on the intake side of the pump. He can open a valve and suck as much out of a shuttle as he wants.
Ten foot long gates along the side of the deck help keep boxes, jugs and large shuttles from falling off the trailer.
To fill the trailer, Wildfong has a bottom fill system set up, so he can pump all three tanks full at once.
“We pull up to the dugout in our yard and it takes about 25 minutes to fill the three tanks with a three-inch Honda pump we leave at the dugout. This summer we’re planning to pour some new cement at the dugout, with a big overhead arm. We’ll probably switch to a four-inch pump in the well and we’ll fill from the top,” he said.
When full, the trailer hauls 4,800 gallons, of which 4,500 are usable, so it’s nearly four fills.
“We put on 3.5 gallons per acre and 1,000 acres is a pretty good day for us, so it usually keeps us going all day.”
Wildfong crops about 9,000 acres in four locations, so the truck gets parked in an old farmyard and he brings the sprayer to the water truck.
“When the truck is parked, the first thing anybody does is pull the arm out. When the sprayer man comes around, he backs up to the arm, with the boom parallel to the truck,” he said.
“If he’s got a helper it’s nice because he’ll pop the lid open and stick the hose in the hole. By the time you’re out of the tractor he’s got the motor running. In 15 or 20 minutes we’re full and going again.”
For convenience, Wildfong added stairs on the back of the trailer.
“You’ve got to get up on the deck to start the pump, open and close the valves. When you’re tired or in a hurry, we try to make it as safe as we can.”
If he was to do it again, Wildfong said he’d build some catwalks on either side of the truck to get at the tank valves easier. He’d also get black tanks, to prevent the algae growth he gets in the white tanks. He’d also consider a stainless steel tanker in the future.
