Effective Top Dressing with MagnaSpread and Grasshopper

Many plants need that extra helping of nitrogen booster this time of year, as the growing period between April and June often brings an excess of rain in many parts of the country.  Top dressing your crops, with the help of a single-axle MagnaSpread or Grasshopper from BBI Spreaders, may make the difference between a mediocre yield and maxing out your potential.

While top dressing post-emergent plants is part of the culture of farming in many areas, such as the Carolinas and Virginia, it’s not a monolithic farming practice from region to region across North America.  While you certainly don’t need to top dress every year, the practice becomes an integral tool in a farmer’s arsenal any time that nature isn’t exactly conducive to optimal growing.  Top dressing can remedy seasons that are too wet or too dry. And in the case of certain areas, such as eastern North Carolina, home of BBI customer Danny Joyner, it can remedy the type of soil deficiencies that simply don’t affect farmers in places like Iowa and other breadbasket states.

While many farmers may not top dress every single year, the practice is applicable whenever pre-season applications fail to take hold. If early fertilizing doesn’t work, you’ve got to dress it up—it’s that simple. In some areas, it’s a cultural, common way of life that goes back to spoon-feeding plants what they need, when they need it.  A lot of application, particularly pre-emergent applicaton, is feeding the soil to feed the plant. Top dressing is directly feeding the plant.  And if the soil isn’t optimal—too much rain, too little, or lacking in the proper nutrient mix—the farmer must feed the plant that extra difference.

BBI offers two models that are optimized for top dressing post-emergent plants in mid-season.  The nine-foot Grasshopper and 10-foot MagnaSpread models are BBI’s solutions custom-tailored for a variety of top dressing applications.  Both models feature high ground clearance from tall, thin tires, along with widths optimized for riding between rows of post-emergent plants.  Grasshopper, a mechanical, ground-wheel-drive spreader, and MagnaSpread, BBI’s line of hydraulic spreaders for fertilizer and lime applications, both offer the greatest precision in their respective classes, along with the widest, flattest spread patterns.

Grasshopper and MagnaSpread deliver optimized drive intervals, yielding greater efficiency through saved time and saved money.   And for many farms, these two models can not only handle mid-season top dressing requirements, but also take care of pre-season applications as well. 

For more information on Grasshopper and MagnaSpread, and how our smaller models can fit your top dressing needs, visit your local BBI dealer or learn more at www.bbispreaders.com.