Crop Dusting share your picture and stories.

[deserteagle71]

This past February our local cropduster was testing some new equipment:

 

[MossRoad]

Wife and I were driving down a local narrow county road. A crop duster was doing the edge of the field on the right, and flew almost directly at us. So I rolled up the windows and turned off the vents. Sure enough, about 3-4 seconds after he passed, the car got misted with droplets of who knows what? We washed the windshield, and continued on our way. Hosed the car off when we got home.

 

[2LaneCruzer]

We lived in the country, next to a wheat field when I was in high school. One day, they were spraying the wheat for green bugs; very close to our house. They were probably using Parathion; which is what they used in those days.

I saw our baby chicks eating the disabled green bugs in our yard; the whole bunch were dead in a few hours.

 

[MossRoad]

I have a friend that has given up gardening in his back yard due to the crop dusters... everything wilts and dies within days after the plane goes by.

 

[ponytug]

I have a friend that has given up gardening in his back yard due to the crop dusters... everything wilts and dies within days after the plane goes by.

Not that it helps your friend particularly, but the adjacent farmer is liable for overspray in many areas. I'm not sure the few dollars would be worth the neighborly ill will to me, but I certainly wouldn't be putting in backyard veggies for sure.

@2LaneCruzer That's quite the story. The sodium chlorate would probably have been used as a desiccant, to defoliate and dry the plants out for harvest. They still use it today (defoliate-750).

https://ipm.ucanr.edu/agriculture/cotton/harvest-aid-chemicals/#gsc.tab=0

All the best,

Peter

 

[oosik]

This time of year - the Forrest Service and several local crop dusters are flying for fire suppression. Some are turbo Air Tractors - 802 AT.

The really impressive one is the converted commercial passenger jet with the bright red fire retardant.

Last year I let the Forrest Service dip water out of my little lake. There were four choppers. Suppressing a fire - real close. It was exciting to watch. Like a small swarm of bees.

 

[2LaneCruzer]

Not that it helps your friend particularly, but the adjacent farmer is liable for overspray in many areas. I'm not sure the few dollars would be worth the neighborly ill will to me, but I certainly wouldn't be putting in backyard veggies for sure.

@2LaneCruzer That's quite the story. The sodium chlorate would probably have been used as a desiccant, to defoliate and dry the plants out for harvest. They still use it today (defoliate-750).

https://ipm.ucanr.edu/agriculture/cotton/harvest-aid-chemicals/#gsc.tab=0

All the best,

Peter

As I recall, it was the per chlorate version, the same that is used in solid rocket fuel. There was a huge factory in Henderson Nevada that burned to the ground when they suffered a natural gas line rupture. Had a worker tell me he got it on his gloves in the wet state; it later dried, and when he went to take them off, they burst into flame.

Edit...guess you were right, it was the chlorate version. We eventually developed a formulation that was safe to use; it was called Tumbleaf.

 

[deserteagle71]

This time of year - the Forrest Service and several local crop dusters are flying for fire suppression. Some are turbo Air Tractors - 802 AT.

Those guys helped save my place from a wildfire a few years ago.

When the fire came roaring over the mountain a few minutes later that red band of retardant stopped the fire right there:

 

[Jstpssng]

The orchard I worked in used to hire a spray plane in spring, when it was too wet to use the tractor. I've seen him come in so low he'd be breaking water sprouts off with his axle. He'd come over the cold storage building, and lift the tail up to keep from hitting it.
During the same time period we had a massive outbreak of spruce budworm, which was devastating the softwood forests so every spring there was a massive spray program. You'd be driving down the interstate and see a convoy of planes flying in formation at treetop level, heading back to the airport.

 

[oldnslo]

No pictures but had drones doing fields behind my house and plane doing fields to east and west. Watched the two drones land and take off from trailer that had generator and chem tank. Didn’t time but would estimate around 8 - 10 minutes to spray a load and 1 - 2 minutes to reload chem and swap battery.

From reading I have done drones excel for small odd shaped fields or areas with lots of terrain changes and obstacles like trees, buildings, power lines etc. a big field around here is 120 - 160 acres and most have trees and power lines around them.

 

[Complete Turf Care]

When I was working on a rice farm, I would put on a raincoat so that I could 'flag' an irregular shaped field for the aerial applicator to spray. I would crouch down to the ground when the airplane passed over me, then take x steps and wave the flag for the next pass.
Most of the time when I did this, they were applying propanil, which is a herbicide for grassy weeds.
That was 40-50 years ago. About 30-40 years ago, they started using GPS and no longer needed flagmen.

 

[K5lwq]

This past February our local cropduster was testing some new equipment:
View attachment 882016

View attachment 882017

Beautiful pictures!! Thanks for sharing these!

 

[K5lwq]

A couple of years before my dad passed I took him to Olney TX to tour the Air Tractor plant. They were just shutting down production for the day. The manager took dad and I into the plant and explained how the planes moved through the building for different stages of assembly. Then he told us to have fun and at the end of the line there is a finished plane that he told us to feel free to climb into the cockpit. We had a blast. They did not have any we could test fly but said they would schedule something if we wanted to come back. We never did that but sure thought about it.

The story of Snow moving the operations to Olney was very interesting. There is a picture of him pulling his plane on the main gear behind a 57 Chevy truck. Cool picture. The link below shares some of the story but much more on the walls of their offices.

Our Heritage

Our Heritage Build a better airplane. Keep improving it. By most accounts, it’s fair to say that Air Tractor founder Leland Snow did more to advance the ag aviation industry...

airtractor.com

 

[flyerdan]

Between the human flaggers in the fields and gps, there was the automatic flagman system that came out in the early 70's, I believe. A heavy cardboard trapezoidal base with two streamers of toilet paper-like material in a chute on top of one wing within the propwash to pressurize it so there would be one over the solenoid so it could be popped upwards out of the frame and away.
When the plane came in, you'd hook up the hopper hose, start the pump, grab a box of flags and fill the dispenser, clean the bugs off the windscreen, unhook the hose and it's taking off again. Start mixing the next load and do it all again in a few minutes.

 

[Complete Turf Care]

I remember the toilet paper flags. They didn’t seem to be very effective.

 

[bdhsfz6]

Every time I think of crop dusting, I'm reminded of the iconic scene from Hitchcock's North by Northwest:

 

[bindian]

Only ag plane I ever worked on was a Piper Pawnee Brave with a P&W PT6 behind the prop.

 

[Sigarms]

Off topic, but I learned about crop dusting in the south.

It's when you pass gas (AKA flatulence) and walk by some people.

Never forget when a co worker started laughing when I started gagging by a smell.

In his heavy NC dialect, he just looked at me and informed me I've just been crop dusted. Got to admit, thought it was a funny phrase. Never heard of the phrase for that use up north.

 

[MossRoad]

Last year my wife and I were pulling into a Menards store, and she said "there's a helicopter parked at that hotel." I was like.... what? So we went back and looked. Yep. A spraying helicopter sitting in a weed patch vacant lot next to the hotel. There were also two tanker trucks with landing pads on top in the parking lot. Apparently they were a spraying outfit from Alabama or close to that with contracts to spray power line right of ways.

 

[Long Roof]

This is from 2019 in Macon County IL. I happened to be on the front porch with my camera and got an entertaining show.