Spraying urea

Take an Ibc cut off the top, 1/3 fill ibc with rain water preferably, on a warm day. Dribble in big bag of urea into it and you may have some way of stirring it or pumping the water around to dissolve it. Plaster stirrer on a drill, some class of water pump, whatever. as it's dissolving add more water til you have 1000litres with a a big bag of urea dissolved. Ice may form temporarily and wear ppe, so careful now. I'd add a bit of molasses rather than humates cos I'm mane like that and only add it when filling the sprayer. The urea will stay in solution, so you can do it ahead of time. Filter the stuff into the sprayer. Tights over the filling hose even, as urea tends to have a few foreign objects in it. After that do the maths to get your desired rate. At semi normal sprayer rates, you'll probably get about 7-10 units out. The theory is the plant gets it quick and the nitrogen use efficiency is much better. Few lads around here do it for second cut silage when its dry. It's a pita doing it, but there are good potential reductions I guess. Oh and don't do it with protected urea. Any scorching, burning, dissolved nostrils, frozen pumps, etc etc are your own look out.
 
Ugo Schtiglitz said:
Take an Ibc cut off the top, 1/3 fill ibc with rain water preferably, on a warm day. Dribble in big bag of urea into it and you may have some way of stirring it or pumping the water around to dissolve it. Plaster stirrer on a drill, some class of water pump, whatever. as it's dissolving add more water til you have 1000litres with a a big bag of urea dissolved. Ice may form temporarily and wear ppe, so careful now. I'd add a bit of molasses rather than humates cos I'm mane like that and only add it when filling the sprayer. The urea will stay in solution, so you can do it ahead of time. Filter the stuff into the sprayer. Tights over the filling hose even, as urea tends to have a few foreign objects in it. After that do the maths to get your desired rate. At semi normal sprayer rates, you'll probably get about 7-10 units out. The theory is the plant gets it quick and the nitrogen use efficiency is much better. Few lads around here do it for second cut silage when its dry. It's a pita doing it, but there are good potential reductions I guess. Oh and don't do it with protected urea. Any scorching, burning, dissolved nostrils, frozen pumps, etc etc are your own look out.
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I find prilled urea to have much less muck in it and rarely needs filtering.

I’ve never sprayed humates or molasses onto a growing crop. Spent 5yrs spraying molasses onto stubble and gave it up because I couldn’t ever see any benefit, and the hassle of washing the subsequent scum off the sprayer. Do you think there’s a benefit spraying molasses/humates onto a growing crop? What rates of molasses do you use?
I sidesow humates that are mixed with the starter fert on summer crops. I do this because it’s supposed to help roots find and retain water better. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen any benefits but then again everything was been treated as a blanket job. This year I couldn’t get the starter with humates that I needed so I switched to a starter with a lot of sulfur. I had enough old stock to do about half of the summer crops, and I changed starter in the middle of a field…There’s absolutely no difference between the crops that got humates and those that got extra sulfur so far. But it’s early days yet.
 
Sheebadog said:
I find prilled urea to have much less muck in it and rarely needs filtering.

I’ve never sprayed humates or molasses onto a growing crop. Spent 5yrs spraying molasses onto stubble and gave it up because I couldn’t ever see any benefit, and the hassle of washing the subsequent scum off the sprayer. Do you think there’s a benefit spraying molasses/humates onto a growing crop? What rates of molasses do you use?
I sidesow humates that are mixed with the starter fert on summer crops. I do this because it’s supposed to help roots find and retain water better. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen any benefits but then again everything was been treated as a blanket job. This year I couldn’t get the starter with humates that I needed so I switched to a starter with a lot of sulfur. I had enough old stock to do about half of the summer crops, and I changed starter in the middle of a field…There’s absolutely no difference between the crops that got humates and those that got extra sulfur so far. But it’s early days yet.
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Only 2-3 litres/ha with urea. Humic substances vary greatly in their quality and sprayer friendliness. That's why I don't tend to put them in the sprayer. If those mad hippies are correct, it should help by being a carbon source to buffer the effects of the nitrogen. If the mad hippies are full of it, then I've only spent a few pence.
I'd be nearly putting out as much Sulphur as Niter here for cereals here a lot of the time.
 
Ugo Schtiglitz said:
Only 2-3 litres/ha with urea. Humic substances vary greatly in their quality and sprayer friendliness. That's why I don't tend to put them in the sprayer. If those mad hippies are correct, it should help by being a carbon source to buffer the effects of the nitrogen. If the mad hippies are full of it, then I've only spent a few pence.
I'd be nearly putting out as much Sulphur as Niter here for cereals here a lot of the time.
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Light land?
Using more sulfur myself because I’ve less and less fym.

I’ll be over to a plot later that I planted for a neighbor without any starter. The plot is tiny bu there should be a difference in the color…I’ll post a pic.
 
Sheebadog said:
Light land?
Using more sulfur myself because I’ve less and less fym.

I’ll be over to a plot later that I planted for a neighbor without any starter. The plot is tiny bu there should be a difference in the color…I’ll post a pic.
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Yeah, light land. Or maybe more accurately, calcium dominated. So using lots of sulphur to try and strip out calcium and restore the ca:mg balance a bit. I don't believe in magic much, but I think the kinsey approach has some things to recommend it, so long as you don't get lost in the micronutrients end of things. The closer I can push the ca:mg balance towards ideal(within economic reason), the better the soil structure. And in my view, that bit is important for the no-tilling.
All this being said, the crops seem to like it too. If fert prices and practicality weren't the object, I'd probs wind up using ASN as main niter source, bag of kieserite for mg and S, SOP for potash and DAP at drilling, winding up with almost as much sulphur as nitrogen going out.
Basically, I get away with a lot less N if I can pump up potash sulfur and mg on the light land, and anything I can do to get Om levels up without adding to ca:mg imbalance, yahoo. The cover cropping should slowly help with this and help bind and hold some of that sulphur mg and potash rather than having it wash out in winter.
 
Ugo Schtiglitz said:
Yeah, light land. Or maybe more accurately, calcium dominated. So using lots of sulphur to try and strip out calcium and restore the ca:mg balance a bit. I don't believe in magic much, but I think the kinsey approach has some things to recommend it, so long as you don't get lost in the micronutrients end of things. The closer I can push the ca:mg balance towards ideal(within economic reason), the better the soil structure. And in my view, that bit is important for the no-tilling.
All this being said, the crops seem to like it too. If fert prices and practicality weren't the object, I'd probs wind up using ASN as main niter source, bag of kieserite for mg and S, SOP for potash and DAP at drilling, winding up with almost as much sulphur as nitrogen going out.
Basically, I get away with a lot less N if I can pump up potash sulfur and mg on the light land, and anything I can do to get Om levels up without adding to ca:mg imbalance, yahoo. The cover cropping should slowly help with this and help bind and hold some of that sulphur mg and potash rather than having it wash out in winter.
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Very high ph?
Land like that would absolutely guzzle sulfur. I suppose that too far east is west also…don’t want to be lowering ph at a micro level either.

First pic no starter. Second pic, same variety, same day, same grain density. To be fair the first pic is a tiny 2ac field with a complete different rotation etc.
All research points to starter making no difference whatsoever to final grain yield. I’m not so sure.
There’s a much more obvious difference in color in real life.


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@Sheebadog is there much elemental S used in France. I have run myself a bit into a corner as cant use kieserite anymore and to get my required S from AS, entails me spreading too much N on my grazing ground. Calcium sulphate is an option, but like Ugo, my soil ates S
 
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Ozzy Scott said:
@Sheebadog is there much elemental S used in France. I have run myself a bit into a corner as can use kieserite anymore and to get my required S from AS, entails me spreading too much N on my grazing ground. Calcium sulphate is an option, but like Ugo, my soil ates S
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No I’ve only seen it used once and that was with fella that wanted to reduce ph for blueberries I think. How would you spread it. Mostly gypsum based here that I know of.
 
Digging up an old thread here but doing sums in my head atm and trying to justify something to the next generation.

Suppose one has a dairy herd with a 75 acre grazing platform.
Spreading CAN every round at a rate of 1bag/acre - 27 units/acre ( we won’t even go there with protected urea etc)

Suppose one had a great recovery system which generated lots of lukewarm water. And then suppose someone were to switch to dissolving urea and spreading at 15 units/acre. Would they get the same response (assuming oh and indexes were right) from the 15units of liquid compared with 27 units of granular?
This hypothetical situation may help to pay a few of the hypothetical payments on a second hypothetical tractor as were one would be hypothetically sick of changing implements they whole time
 
Uptown125 said:
Digging up an old thread here but doing sums in my head atm and trying to justify something to the next generation.

Suppose one has a dairy herd with a 75 acre grazing platform.
Spreading CAN every round at a rate of 1bag/acre - 27 units/acre ( we won’t even go there with protected urea etc)

Suppose one had a great recovery system which generated lots of lukewarm water. And then suppose someone were to switch to dissolving urea and spreading at 15 units/acre. Would they get the same response (assuming oh and indexes were right) from the 15units of liquid compared with 27 units of granular?
This hypothetical situation may help to pay a few of the hypothetical payments on a second hypothetical tractor as were one would be hypothetically sick of changing implements they whole time
Click to expand...
You'll burn grass at 15 units unless it's the dribbler heads. And then you are gone away from foliar. 7 to 10 units is usually what anyone would be doing. There'd be no real need for lukewarm water. But there'd probably would at 100 litres per acre. What I'm doing is 12 to 14 acres with 2000 litres.
You may try it first before going all in on the tractor.

I think all the add ins are just as important as the urea. Add ins being molasses, humic acid, fulvic acid, seaweed, could even go now wood vinegar, any additions of zinc and copper based on soil tests, ammonium sulphate, magnesium sulphate, citric acid, fish, etc. Further on some even use a mixture of any of the above with the urea and put it in a vat and mix with lactic acid bacteria and let it brew for a while in anaerobic conditions. It's supposed to make it all even more available to the plant.
Doing all or any though in a grass context makes the ground more richer in OM and carbon. It's both good and bad. Good in summer and bad when it gets real wet. But maybe the longer you do it the further down the drainage from the increased OM goes.
Obviously the larger the sprayer you can get the better for yourself as all this takes time. It's not as easy and quick as opening a bag over a spreader. There is a possibility of pre mixing in ibcs on wet days. But it depends on the ingredients if they can go off or not.
 
Uptown125 said:
Digging up an old thread here but doing sums in my head atm and trying to justify something to the next generation.

Suppose one has a dairy herd with a 75 acre grazing platform.
Spreading CAN every round at a rate of 1bag/acre - 27 units/acre ( we won’t even go there with protected urea etc)

Suppose one had a great recovery system which generated lots of lukewarm water. And then suppose someone were to switch to dissolving urea and spreading at 15 units/acre. Would they get the same response (assuming oh and indexes were right) from the 15units of liquid compared with 27 units of granular?
This hypothetical situation may help to pay a few of the hypothetical payments on a second hypothetical tractor as were one would be hypothetically sick of changing implements they whole time
Click to expand...
You're not too far wrong here, but 15 being the same as 27 is a bit of a stretch. I would say try a foliage analysis and see what your most limiting factor is. Usually its not nitrogen. On the small bit of grass here, I nearly never use niter, but use potash and sulphur and Mg. Foliar will work faster, has greater nue but is a pain in the arse job at any scale. If you have a luke warm water it will certainly help dissolve stuff. If I was a grassland man, I'd be looking at a tow and fert (or some homemade version) rather than a sprayer, because liquid fert has a habit of dissolving sprayers as well.
 
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