Michael's Turf VLOG - How to Calculate Your 'Application Pace'

Are you getting the results you need from your spray application?

Maybe your sprayer always drains itself before the job is done... or what's worse, has plenty leftover - that's wasted chemical, which = wasted money straight outa your back pocket.

If you can identify with any of these problems, you may have your application rate or spray rate all wrong.

Check out Michael's Turf Tip video where he shows us how to easily calculate our 'Application Pace'.

Once you know your application pace, you can quickly work out the exact amount of chemical you need to put in your sprayer to cover the required area.

Throw us a like or let us know if this has helped you.

Video Transcript

Hello and welcome back to another Turf Vlog. As the weather warms up and we're all gearing ourselves up for a big spring, I thought it timely to help you guys ensure you are being as effective as possible with your lawn care program. When spraying out product through your sprayer, it is important to get the correct amount of active ingredient out over the desired area. In most instances, there is no set water volume for the amount of active ingredient over an area. Further to this, everyone sprays at a different rate, hence why we all need to calculate our spray rate.

There is a very simple way to work this out and I would recommend for everyone that hasn't to work out your spray rate before you do any more spraying. Like anything, there are many ways to go about it and how I'm about to show you is one very simple way. Firstly, I'm going to measure out my 25 square metres. It doesn't have to be this size but whatever size works best for you. I'm going to use a measuring wheel and a string line out here on the front lawn at the warehouse so I'm going to show you what I'm going to do right now.

Secondly, get your sprayer and measure out your water. For my square meters, I'm going to use about two liters of water. So, I've got my  Solo 414 sprayer here and I'm just going to go and measure out my two liters of water. Now I've measured out my two liters of water, I can now take my sprayer and spray it over the area.

Now, as mentioned before, you don't have to use two liters of water and you don't have to use 25 square meters. For me in my trial, this was going to work perfectly for me.

Now we've measured our 2 liters of water, now's the time to pressurize our sprayer or like me just simply turn it on and go and evenly spray over the area you've just measured. Now to work out your pace, just walk at a normal walking pace how you'd spray naturally. So now I'm just going to go and do that evenly over the area I've just measured out.

Now that we've sprayed over our area evenly that we measured out, now is the time to find out how much water we have remaining. In my instance, I have one liter of water left. So now I can say that over 25 square meters, my spray rate is one liter of water.

Now you've worked at your spray rate, when it comes to spraying any chemical, you can work out how much active or product you need to add into your sprayer. Another calculation I'm sure some of you will find handy is most products state a rate per hectare. Now, how do I work out this per 100 square meters or 10 square meters or whatever area size you have?

Let's do it. One hectare is ten thousand square meters. Divide that by ten, we get one thousand square meters. Divide one thousand square meters by ten, we get one hundred square meters. Divide one hundred square meters by 10, we get 10 square meters.

Let's use  Dicamba M as an example. Its rate is 6.5 liters per hectare as its application rate. Divide 6.5 by 10, you get 650 mL. That equates to 650 mL per thousand square meters. Divide that by 10, we get 65 mL per 100 square meters. Divide that by 10, we know it's 6.5 mL per 10 square meters.

Going off what you've just worked out for your application rate, and mine, I know that my application rate per liter is 16.25 mils. Moving forward, any product that you may come across to use that has a different application rate, you can work that out and do the sums just like we've done to work out how much mL of active or product you need for your area size.

I hope this has been helpful and if you have any other questions, please be free to reach out or if you'd like me to step it through one on one. Thank you again for listening and look forward to having you on our next episode.