District staff recently applied 10 tons of pelletized lime to 5.6 acres of grass field at the Beavercreek Demonstration Farm. That is an application rate of about 1.78 tons/acre. We used a fertilizer cart from Wilbur Ellis to do this, because we wanted to see how this device might work for folks with only a few acres of land. Our conclusion? This is a viable solution for many small acreage landowners.
(Why did we apply lime? To counter the acidity of our soil, thus making basic nutrients more available to the plants growing in the fields.)
A quick walk-around of the fertilizer cart is provided in the following video. We expect to produce a more comprehensive training video in the near future.
Note that the cart does not require a three-point hitch. Instead, the cart is powered by the tractor’s power takeoff (PTO) unit, and it is pulled by connecting it to the tractor’s draw bar.
Our gallery of snapshots from the day show that even a small tractor like Big Red can pull and operate the fertilizer cart.
