 What I'm going to talk to you today about is effectively applying pre-emergent herbicides with home-trend spreaders. So we can get a really good weed control using pre-emergent products over container nurseries, and that's primarily done with granular pre-emergent materials. These are normally applied anywhere from 8 to 10 week intervals, and if you do it you can really save a lot of money on weed control, and that's how most of the nurseries are handled on it. So the cost, the hand weed one acre of production is about anywhere from $3,600 to $5,000 a year per acre for labor costs if you were to have to hand weed, but using pre-emergent product, five applications, you're only looking at about $1,400 in labor to apply those products. So significant savings there. However, there is some issues with applicators over-applying or under-applying the products. And a lot of times when I send pictures to applicators and ask them which one is appropriate rate of 200 pounds per acre, most of them get the higher, the pictures with the more granules in it. The one second to the left is normally chosen, and that is about four times the recommended rate, 200 pounds per acre. So about 800 pounds per acre. So that's a lot of money to be wasted in products that potentially damage your plant if you were to over-apply. So these things are very effective. These granular pre-emergent products are very effective. There's a lot of variation on their application efficiency just because of the nature of the equipment we're using to apply them. And these are typically done by hand cranked spreaders and most nurseries. And as they walk up and down the block, the applicator is to hand crank this out. Because of the way it grows from the perio, it gets applied pretty unevenly and the further away or the longer your, or a lot of your swath width, the more uneven it becomes. So here's an example of some data we took when we had the spreader. The bed was to the left of the spreader. You can see the numbers at the top of that row there where those are pounds per acre. Our target was 200 pounds per acre. So for every split, we took samples to see where we would be as far as our application output, the range of pounds per acre to 316 pounds per acre. And this is what happens when the bed was to the right of the spreader, where actually the peak is in the middle of the bed. It's pretty uneven. There's some things you can do to kind of improve the efficiency of these. A lot of this information came from John Neal NC State. He's done a lot of work on this. So I'm going to present some of the materials you can find in this thinking back sheet they have. One thing that's very important is calibration. I don't know if everybody knows that, but very few people do it. Probably the easiest way to do this is the way to spreader pre and post applications to a known area. Got a little key here, a little table. So if you're going to 200 pounds per acre, that would be putting out about 4.6 pounds per thousand square feet. So with some simple math, if you figure out if you're in that ballpark range, if you need some help on that, give us a call and we'll be glad to walk you through this. Also consistency, especially with your walking speed, you walk about two and a half to three miles per hour, that's a pretty easy speed. Now as the day goes on, your applications are probably going to slow down. So you need to pick a speed that's going to be comfortable over a long period of time. A lot of folks that are really good applicators, they use metronomes. You keep the speed consistent where your foot lands on the beat, kind of like Mark and Dan. I'm normally applying about 90 beats per minute. And if you don't have a metronome, you can also just look on the internet for songs that are at about 90 beats per minute, put some headphones on and kind of walk to that beat. Pretty decent pace there. Here's breaking speed. Now this is a little harder to do, because you're trying to maintain about 60 rotations per minute. That's what Joe Neal has identified as being more of the ideal for application efficiency goes. So it's a little difficult to be walking 90 beats per minute when we're cranking 60 rotations per minute, but it takes some practice. There's also rotors on a lot of these hand crank spreaders that allow you to only throw the material within the bed and keeping it from outside of the bed if you're on the bed edges. He recommends not using the rudder and keeping it in a center position because it definitely throws off your application efficiency. It's okay if some of that material gets in the roadways and around the edges of the bed, that's just going to help control those nine crop areas. So to stay consistent, keep that rudder in the center position. Also the fill level on the hopper, you know, at 10% the application rate can drop as much as 45% lower. So keep that hopper at least 25% full. Once it drops below the cone where the cone starts, your application efficiency really, really, really drops. So if you can just tell your applicators once you get to where the cone starts, it's time to refill the hopper. Also, maintaining eight foot squats can be really effective in improving your application efficiency. That gives you with most eight foot beds 30 to 35% overlap, which really improves the efficiency. You can see on the left of these curves here, you've got your pounds per acre. You can see how much it dips in between the beds on a 12 foot squat versus the eight foot squats with a 30 to 35% overlap. So much more efficient when you tighten up those squats with. Another method is for something to consider. Not a lot of people want to do this because it requires double the amount of walking. But when you apply that hopper, it's going to throw that material and it's going to favor the right. That's the way that center throws the material. And so it's going to kind of favor the right there. So that's going to equal some results of unequal applications. So one method that John Neil suggests is the about kind of an about faith method where when you go down the road, you're only going to put out half the rate. When we get to the end of the road, instead of starting a new road, you're going to do an about faith. So you turn around, you put the other half of your material out going down that same road. And in doing so, that really rounds out that curve and improves your application efficiency. I said, here's some resources for using hand straight spreaders efficiently. Again, a different look each day. Some really good material here, just some different ways to improve the application efficiency and then also different methods to calibrate your spreaders. If you need any more advice on this, please give us a call or you can reach me at my email there at PSDKEJM at Auburn.edu. Thank you.