Wintry Rain

We definitely have the wintry rain thing going on this year. After a brutally dry summer it started raining in mid-October and hasn’t stopped. We did some renovations on our shop last spring, so now we have a nice place to work while confined by the wintry rains.

One project we’re working on is to convert our equipment to apply nitrogen fertilizer on corn from anhydrous ammonia to UAN. To do this we’re adding saddle tanks on the tractor to carry the UAN, which is a liquid.

We bought a set of used saddle tanks, seen above, to carry the UAN on the tractor. The guy we bought them from had used them on an International Harvester tractor, so we had to do some metal fabricating to make them fit on our John Deere.

Then we’re adding coulters and knives to inject the UAN in the ground. These coulters make just a narrow slot for the knives, so we don’t disturb our no-tilled soils very much.

Since UAN is a liquid naturally we need a pump and plumbing to move it from the tanks into the ground.

If you look at that picture full-size you can see some black lines drawn on the plywood bench. That’s my plumbing design showing how the fertilizer is going to flow through all those parts. I have my fingers crossed that I’ll be able to plumb all this up and have fertilizer going where it should.

We’ve got a couple of month before the wintry rains leave us. That should be enough time for this project.