What is an herbicide sprayer?

An herbicide sprayer is an important piece of spray equipment for preventing and managing weeds. From personal gardening and lawn care to large-scale agricultural applications, choosing an herbicide sprayer that is right for your operation is imperative to ensuring the health of your plants. Herbicide sprayers come in many styles, including hose-end sprayers, backpack sprayers, and handheld tanks for spot applications. Herbicide sprayers allow you to measure the exact amount of herbicide required for the job, prevent over-spraying, and ensure precise and uniform coverage on only the intended areas.

How do you calibrate an herbicide sprayer?

To calibrate your herbicide sprayer, you will need to do a test spray of your target area.

1. Fill the spray reservoir with water.
2. Select the pressure setting and nozzle you intend to use.
3. Set up a test area of 10 feet wide by 43.5 feet long (approximately 1/100th of an acre).
4. Set a timer while you uniformly spray the test area.
5. After completing the test, spray into an empty bucket for the duration that it took to spray the sample area. Multiply the amount of water deposited into the bucket by 100. This is your carrier volume per acre.

How do you clean an herbicide sprayer?

Always clean herbicide agriculture sprayers between uses. Cleaning your spray equipment has many benefits, including protecting the crop from the consequences of excess or unintended chemical applications, protecting the user, and ensuring the longevity of the sprayer.

Here is how to clean your spray equipment:

1. Flush the entire system with full tanks of water. You may also use a defoaming agent to save water and time flushing the tank. For Group 2 chemical products, cleaning agents such as ammonia may be useful to thoroughly clean the sprayer system. Ammonia improves the cleaning process by raising the pH of the cleaning solution, which makes certain herbicides dissolve more quickly.
2. Remember to always clean the sprayer out in the field. The tank should not be drained while stationary in order to minimize the contamination of runoff into sensitive areas and waterways.

You should keep separate sprayers for each class of chemical that you plan on using. For example, if you spray both herbicide and insecticide on your crops, you should use a different sprayer for each application.

The residue from herbicides often stays in the tank long after being cleaned and can cause serious harm to your crops if concurrently applied with insecticides. Always identify and label each sprayer, and always clean thoroughly before storing.