Had to get up this morning at 4:30 A.M. to turn on a surface aerator as my perch fry production pond is going crazy with an algae bloom at a clarity of 8 inches (no fertilization for at least a month). This happened last year too around this time when temps climb and it causes hopoxia in the am hours.

I would have just turned it on at night but I already have two lights for feed training and a diffuser compressor on the same circuit at night and prefer to pull them at 4:30 A.M. and then crank on the surface aerator, which is when it's needed.

Anyway didn't sleep well that night either and decided to crawl back in bed on Sunday morning at 4:45. At 6 A.M. I wake up to a crop duster flying back and forth in the farm field across the highway. And let me tell you it's not quiet.

Would it be to much to ask not to make noise worse than a lawnmower at 6 A.M. on a Sunday morning? Or am I over the top? Jeeze Louise who works at 6 A.M. on Sunday morning?

Thoughts?

Crop dusters are often not your normal sort... Maybe trying to avoid calls saying "I got sprayed"? Not many people out and about at that time.

Could be worse! BNSF RR has a major North and South bound two track crossing at the end of my drive way. Its harvest time and for the next three months grain car trains will BLAST them huge horns ALL night and day at the crossing.

When there's a short window to work, you work all the hours that you can! It's calm out first thing in the morning too, so less spray drift due to wind.

Fine I'll get my AAA set up and that will be the end of that.





I need to remove it from my boat from using it against jet skis first. Might take a little time. By that time the little yellow bastard will probably be gone.

I emailed in a complaint to my Sheriff's department. Probably shouldn't have but when I don't get my sleep I'm grouchy!

Boy, sounds like your allergies, meds, and such is REALLY making you cranky, eh?

PTSD?

Careful Cecil, that will have the Feds knocking on your door! The FAA does not take that lightly!

Concerning the rude awakening, it's a pain I know I grew up in the household of a cropduster. There was no such thing as "Sunday morning".

I don't know the recent weather conditions, or what crop he was spraying. But My dad would be out at the ass crack of dawn for several reasons.

Depending on the pest being treated, many times there is a short window of opportunity for the treatment to be effective. So his window is short forcing him to work early. Wind and air is also a factor. The air is best in the early a.m. Many times we'd be out at sunrise, and the air turning to crap by 9 a.m. So had we not been out early, you get the picture.

Not all cropdusters are like the guy in Independence Day. Chances are he wasn't trying to be sneaky....... the sound always gives you away. Very difficult to tip-toe with a 300 h.p. plus engine with straight pipes!

I would give the crop duster a pass.....it's a lot different from the guy with the noisy lawnmower....he mows every week, while the crop duster is once, maybe twice?

I do agree on having respect and consideration for one's neighbors. I don't run equipment at the shop after hours or early in the morning, despite being zoned for commercial use. But a crop duster? Like Scott said, there's a tiny window of opportunity there.

Tony, that's why I don't do any shooting here before 10:00 a.m. and usually give all the neighbors (that are nice and considerate back - what comes around, goes around) a heads up before a trigger is squeezed, or any loud noises happen.

The last time, I texted my neighbor, but they weren't home. Their daughter-in-law was at their house and about jumped out of her shorts tho. That was around 3:00 p.m. and a friend of a friend had to dispose of a firework he had. It was an 8" mortar.........

Brian, the neighbor across the street, was in his garage, roughly 200+ yds away. He said the stuff on the garage walls rattled pretty good.

You can't just buy an 8" mortar over the counter!!!

I still have my pyrotechnics license even though I have not done a show in over 2 years..

You really think anyone would take my post seriously? I would have access to a AAA gun and I shoot at jet skiers with it? Seriously?

As far as the complaint I doubt it would go anywhere. If a call about drag racing on the adjoining road gets me referred to the county by the local police, and then the county refers me back to the local police... Well let's just say I'm probably on a list of whiners. Funny neither have problems giving tickets on each other's terf.

I was concerned someone was going to get hurt with the drag racing whether it was the drag racer or someone who just happened to turn on that road, but apparently it wasn't a concern to the cops.

Actually no. Stopped taking the meds as I'm not having issues after the last heavy rain. I'm just cranky when I can't get my sleep.

Before I make any phone calls I grab a snickers first then I think about the other guys and why they are doing what they are doing right now. Then if I am still over the top with rage I make a phone call.

Crop dusting has a very narrow window and early morning or early evening is the best and only time to spray. They are loud. Kinda like a flying dump truck. Should have been done in an hour and you may not see or hear him again all year.

If it was a Sunday morning every Sunday for a month then I would be kinda pissed and have to talk to the farm owner.

Cheers Don.

Sorry Cecil! I didn't take you seriously. But the world we live in, Just sayin'. I received a few phone calls in my younger years, with people saying they were going to fling lead at the "little blue and white bastard". Now I'm sure they were not serious as no lead was actually flung. But after making one little phone call, the joke was over for them!

I was just trying to give a polite heads up. I did not mean to offend you, but since you called my post to the carpet....

Jim,

No offense taken and thanks for the heads up. I think you're probably right.

Sorry if it appeared I called your post to the carpet. It wasn't meant that way.

Cecil, PM being sent. I probably should have done this a while ago!

Cecil,
You ask who flies that early, well I do!! And I know where you live!!

You can't?

Electronic detonation; he said that if he had a clear line of sight, it'd work up to 3 miles away.

I helped him wire up a display last year for the 4th at a person's house. The display was set to music and it was supposed to last about 20+ minutes. I guess that some of the chickens and peacocks that were on the property keeled over from fright that night.....

I'd like to have the $$ that was spent on that display!

I HATE CROP DUSTERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Are you sure????????????????????

BGK, do you like food? If so crop dusters are your friends. Just saying.

If people really had any idea what kind of money goes into a good show they would be shocked...That one 8" shell depending on what it kind was probably a $100 bill exploding in the sky...

The show I lit for the better part of 20 years only lit 2 8" in the finale...We still did old school and hand lit in 2 teams..Our show was just a small 20 minute show consisting on mostly 3 to 6 inch shells, with at least one in the air at (hopefully) all times...That little show cost $3000 to $3500 depending on donations...

Wonder if BGK is talking about the same kind of crop duster that Cecil is.

Nothing like the smell of napalm (pestcides) in the morning on your breakfast.

I love to watch crop dusters. There was one here about two weeks ago, spraying the field up the road a ways. After he (or she) made a pass he would bank right over our house.... He was so low, I felt like if I were to look hard enough I could determine the orifice size in the spray bar he/she was using.

That looks like such an awesome ride! But then again, I've never flown in anything, so it probably wouldn't take much to impress me.

Omaha, someone was doing some serious crop dusting in the Charlotte airport yesterday!!!

Haha! That is unfortunate!

Looks like it could be dangerous if you got distracted by AAA fire.

Or I could hire some chick to lay out naked and no more crop duster.

Yeah, but then I think you'd have bigger problems on your hands from the other member of your household.

She wouldn't even notice. It took her two weeks to notice i was raising fish in the basement.

I'm gonna take a shot in the dark here but I bet she'd notice a naked chick in her territory a LOT faster than some additional water breathers in her basement...

Methinks so too!

Well if you use naked chicks, you won't have one crop duster, you will have a sky full of airplanes and helicopters, and they won't leave until the girls do!!! Trust me.......

Huh?

When I incubate eggs, all my young chicks come out with yellow feathers covering their little bodies!

Time to go feed the adults!

Crop dusters I hate, those huge skinny tired spray rigs should be the only thing legal. Crop dusters are cool too watch sprkplug for about the first 20-30 minutes weeks of spraying in the area gets old fast.. They are loud, can't be efficient, and the drift off them shouldn't be legal..

Indiana used to have a summer nudist colony on lake Freeman. No idea if it's still there. A biologist was telling me they would perodically electroshock the reservoir. They would always slow down when they came around a point on tbe beach. It was out of safety concerns of course.

Let us know how you really feel.

Not during the school year. Leaves the house before daylight and comes home after dark. Very dedicated teacher. Then crashes until the following morning.

Sounds like a Winged Sprint on Friday nights.........

Ground-sprayers can't go everywhere, especially in muddy conditions, and they're no where nearly as efficient as aerial applications. Also, pesticide off-target drift (ground or aerial) isn't legal, anywhere - period! Most applicators use a polymer drift-control additive to "thicken" the spray-solution - which reduces or eliminates aerosol particles that are otherwise prone to physical drift. That doesn't mean that odor-drift is always avoidable.
Besides common decency, courtesy and concern for others, it is vital to an applicator's livelihood to take every precaution to guard against physical drift - for obvious reasons - and that means a lot of take-offs at the first crack of daylight.
This aerial applicator was able to treat 170 acres of cattails, lotus and mature willows in less than 20 minutes; without any harm to trees on the other sides of the levee. It would've taken days to do an inferior job with a boat-application.

The members on this sight seem to have more common sense than anywhere on the web. I guess that common sense is not as common as it used to be.

cool photo Kelly!

Casual viewing doesn't reveal how much skill most aerial applicators possess, especially the ones who remain alive throughout their career.
Also, technology in equipment has advanced by leaps and bounds since the "old days".
For instances, most aerial applicators use GPS guidance to track their swath-paths, to ensure even coverage. A light-bar above the panel tells the pilot to slip left or right if he's slightly off course for each sequential swath. That's a big advance since the days of "flaggers" on the ground (usually high school kids), who held up flags to visually line up the pilot's approach.
Even the simple concept of a "smoker" (indicated by the arrow in the uppermost photo below) represents a huge advance toward drift-management. This device allows the pilot to "puff smoke" every few passes. The movement of the smoke - if any - conveys real-time wind conditions (speed, direction, etc). The first time I saw a smoker in use, I thought the plane's engine was about to throw a piston.

Good point on the smoke and amazing pictures Kelly! Many people don't realize just how fast wind conditions change, and just by having a line of trees at one end of the field or partly down one side can change wind patterns, no matter how low the wind velocity is.

Kelly, why are the first two so high? The third guy seems about the right height.

On a funny note I had an uncle that was a farmer and a real tightwad. Anyway a crop duster mistakenly sprayed his field when he hadn't requested it. My uncle was smiling from ear to ear because he didn't have to pay for it.

Sometimes you can't always get in a field with a spray rig on tires. Many of them are very careful about drift anymore. Our local crop duster is very gun shy.

That's a valid observation unless you saw what was in his path.
All three photos are of the same pilot, but he was approaching some 30' tall island-growing black willows in the first two photos.
BTW: those water-slurping black willows were treated as well. The fish need the water much worse than the willows!!!

Big iron is fun and it pays the bills, but I miss flying low and fast....

Excellent posts Kelly. I'm looking for the "like" button.

I saw a youtube video a while ago that showed a crop duster flying under the utility wires on the poles.

Another crop-duster "innovation" is a guidewire that spans from the top of the cockpit to the top of the vertical tail. Wanna guess its purpose? (look closely at the first photo that I posted in this thread)
Needless to say, aerial applicators are the high-speed Nick Wallendas of the working class who do their daily jobs without any desire to attract tv coverage or public attention.

Aerial application is an integral part of many agricultural productions. As has been said, conditions will dictate when it can or must be used. Fields are often too wet for land based spray rigs, timing may be critical due to the sudden emergence of pests or weeds in fields nearly ready for harvest, such as a wheat crop which could be lost very quickly if not treated.

Wind drift is a HUGE factor in any kind of spraying. Even here at the house, the best time to spray is almost always at dawn, and the window of opportunity is short.

With the emergence of cover crops, you may see more aerial seeding in the fall. At the farm, we are looking at seeding into standing soybeans to give the cover crop seed a head start. No decisions yet, but it's beginning to look cost effective to help build up the soil and maybe even reduce the amount of fertilizers necessary in the future.

My Dad was a private pilot (not a crop duster), and I know that he thought that most crop dusters were the best skilled civilian pilots. Because of the farm and getting to be around airplanes with my Dad, I love to watch crop dusters, but I understand that not everyone will. Hopefully, you won't be bothered too often, as I understand the value of a good night's rest. But these days, my bladder seems to take care of sleeping too late, and my dog certainly will if my bladder won't!

P.S. I don't know if it is still true, but about 35 years ago, I recall seeing a study that said that the life expectancy of a crop duster was as good as the general population. The reason cited was that in order to get and keep a pilot's license, you have to be in pretty good shape. I've never heard if the study was proven accurate or if it was an anomaly.

GGB

Kelly, is that wire to keep the top of the tail from getting caught or sliced off?

Bingo!

Josh, no one wanted to go down our trail of sophomoric humor...

Only a few dare to be childish enough to do so.

When there aerial spraying out here they must not use a drift agent because I can taste it in my mouth sometimes.. I still hate crop dusters even if they are necessary they definately ain't necessary around me and they still use them..

Need to raise your own food...

I do raise alot of it..

Out of curiosity, what crop are they spraying, and what pest (if you know) are they targeting?
Some pesticide agents contain a fairly potent "aeromatic" as alert-odors; not unlike the foul aroma that is added to natural gas (which is otherwise odorless). None of them are intended to smell pleasant.
If you know the crop-owner or applicator, it is certainly within your rights to request a phone-call alerting you to when a treatment is scheduled - so you can at least know when the plane will fly. You can even trace the plane's number to its owner on-line.
If actual material is drifting onto your property, that's an entirely different story altogether.

The father of our current crop duster was WWII pilot. He would fly above the fence and below the electric lines. He and his coworkers would also be spraying in the same field occasionally.

Last fall I seen 2 crop dusters spraying together in a 1400 acre field for Bertha army worms. It was foggy when they started and I don't know how they didn't crash. I have heard when they spray our canola that if they don't come back with flowers on their tires they are flying to high. Not sure if that's just an exaggeration or not. With our 100 foot sprayer doing 18 miles per hour I sprayed 20 acres in the same time the crop duster did 160 ac across the road.

A long, long, time ago I was working he wheat harvest. We started in North Texas and wound up in Canada. One day we were watching a crop duster. There was one tree in a huge area. He hit it and died. I've always wondered about that.