World's Biggest Sprayer Has 150 Ft. Boom

World's Biggest Sprayer Has 150 Ft. Boom SPRAYING Miscellaneous 21-2-17 "As far as I know it's the biggest sprayer ever built. It lets us cover as many as 200 acres between refills and mounts on rubber tracks so it has great flotation," says Boris Horodynsky, Churchill, Ontario, who built a 150-ft. sprayer with a 3,100-gal. stainless steel tank. He uses a Caterpillar Challenger to pull it. The 14-ft. long, 9-ft. wide spray tank mounts on top of Caterpillar's 116 Mobile Trac System. When loaded, the tank weighs about 18 tons but exerts only about 8 psi on the ground, keeping compaction to a mini-mum. The tracks are 20 in. wide and 116 in. long from hub center to center. A platform on top of the tank makes filling easy. The platform, which is surrounded by steel hand rails, was made by welding hog slats together. "We now make only half the tracks that we made with the 75-ft. sprayer we used before. Fewer tracks has greatly increased yields on the onions and other crops that we grow," says Horodynsky. "For example, we figure that for every sprayer track we eliminate we get about 10,000 more bags of on-ions so the sprayer quickly paid for itself. If I'm spraying at low rates I can cover 200 acres at a time before I have to refill," says Horodynsky, adding that the boom hydraulically folds forward for transport. Horodynsky says he spent about $130,000 to build the big sprayer. Contact: FARMS HOW Followup, Boris Horodynsky, Rt. 1, Churchill, Ontario, Canada L0L 1K0 (ph 705 456-2461; fax 0344).

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