Amazone has answered the question whether it’s possible to spray an area of 1,000ha in just 24 hours by setting a new world record by treating 1,032ha with its UX 11200 sprayer.
Converted into an average work rate, the UX 11200 – at 43ha/hr – also set a second new record for output from today’s modern crop protection technology. With its tank capacity of 12,000 litres and tandem-axle running gear, the UX 11200 is currently the biggest trailed sprayer in the Amazone range and it was equipped with a 40m wide Super-L boom.
The sprayer was pulled behind a 330hp Fendt 933 tractor that achieved average daytime speeds of 13-15km/hr and an average nighttime speed of 17km/hr thanks to the absence of wind and dew formation on the plants. The sprayer was filled directly in the field from a 21,000 litre water bowser supplied by the company Annaburger, along with a 1,000 litre crop protection agent bulk container on the load platform of the towing vehicle, a Mercedes-Benz Unimog.
The world-record operation, which was projected to last exactly 24 hours, started on September 3, 2014, at 12 o’clock at Golzow farm near the village of Golzow in Brandenburg. The farm covers, in total, an area of 6,490ha and is representative of European crop protection conditions in practice and thus shows where the UX 11200 can fully demonstrate its strengths.
The treatment followed the oilseed rape harvest to tackle volunteer rape with glyphosate at an application rate of 100 lit/ha of water across 15 different fields. The sprayer used TurboDrop High Speed nozzles from Agrotop in the size 03.
Due to the variation in stubble length and the emergence of the volunteer rape plants at different heights, the fields proved to be very uneven, thus making it especially demanding on the boom guidance system on the sprayer. In addition, work was made even more difficult by pylons and irrigation points in the fields. Therefore, all these obstacles and exclusion zones were stored in the tractor terminal prior to the record attempt to warn the non-local drivers of these areas in good time.
The tractor was equipped with an automatic steering system that was supplemented by an RTK correction signal via a mobile station. The sprayer was operated via an Amatron 3 in-cab terminal from Amazone, and the automated headland and part-width shut-off via the SectionControl software within the tractor’s terminal.
Almost 30 per cent non-productive time
The statistics created in the course of the world-record attempt showed emphatically the effect of field size and shape on actual work rates: for field sizes between 40 and 124ha and tramline lengths of approximately 0.5 to 1.5km, this value ranged between 38ha/hr on the most unfavourable and 45ha/hr in the best fields. This represents a difference of 18 per cent in the area covered.
Even more noticeable was the importance of unavoidable non-productive periods. Compared with a theoretical acreage output of 60ha/hr, there’s a non-productive differential of 28 per cent. Here, thanks to the large tank capacity on the UX 11200, only eight per cent of the non-productive periods was directly attributed to filling the sprayer. So, despite of the 103,200 litres of spray agent applied in total, the sprayer had to be refilled only 10 times during its world-record course. Depending on the residual amount in the tank, the time needed for each filling procedure was between 10 minutes 55 seconds and 13 minutes 45 seconds, totalling just two hours.
Moving the sprayer between the different fields lost nearly 1.5 hours and thus reprrsented approximately six per cent of the non-productive time. For this, the sprayer and tractor combination had to cover, in total, a distance of almost 20km. Finally, the majority of non-productive time was attributed to driving around pylons and irrigation points and turning on the 40m wide headland. Despite the favourable field structure, this required a time expenditure of 3.5 hours in total and thus almost 15 per cent of the overall non-productive time.
The staff mainly responsible for the organisation and execution of the world-record attempt was the Amazone sales promotion team. So, the 24 hour world-record beating operation was divided into three shifts with three different sprayer drivers on a Fendt 933. Also working on these shifts were the drivers of the Unimogs with Annaburger tankers attached who were responsible for supplying the water and carrying out the filling procedure.
During the world-record attempt, a weather station was installed especially on the Golzow farm with numerous data recorded, such as wind speed, air temperature, humidity and so on. Directly on the side of the field, an additional mobile measuring facility was available to also measure wind speed, temperature and humidity in the field to allow, if necessary, reaction by a change of spray rate or by a complete break in the spraying procedure. However, conditions were almost completely constant with a wind speed during the day of 2 to 3m/sec and at night next to nothing.
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