Has anybody made, used or bought a pull behind Propane weed burner?

[jrsavoie]

Has anybody made, used or bought a pull behind Propane weed burner?

Looking for advice a disent.

Maybe specifics on what it takes to set one up.

I would assume you would need a manifold, a regulator, something to prevent backflash and ignitors. I would think a field cultivator frame or something would work, Or anything you could set for height adjustment. You would probably only have to set height once. A field cultivator would probably be way over kill - too heavy>>

We only have 3 acres that we are thinking about going organic. Any other good methods of Organic weed aND grass control?

Pull behind propane weed burner - Google Search

 

[MrMarty51]

For the price of propane, I wonder if it would be less expensive to get a big pull behind tiller and till for a couple or three years then plant.
Just burning once will not kill all of the weed and plant seed that's left in the ground, it is going to take a couple of years of burning, if not three or four.
I have been using herbicide to kill off the goat head stickers, they say it takes seven years to completely get rid of them, it has been ten so far and they keep popping up their ugly heads. LOL Pun intended. LOL

 

[Will L.]

One more reason farming is cool —flame throwers!

 

[FellowTraveler]

One more reason farming is cool —flame throwers!

Yep, I had some hands on with one of them flamethrowers its "burn baby burn."

 

[jrsavoie]

Yep, I had some hands on with one of them flamethrowers its "burn baby burn."

Do they make small versions - like a 6' to 16' wide? Or any that are adjustable to width?

Any suggestions on making one?

I have a 100 gallon tank here.

 

[MrMarty51]

When running the big bertha weed burner torch I never use a regulator. I would think if You had a half a dozen or so of those weed burner units You could set up a pretty nice pull behind unit, Just get one of those cheap HF fold up trailers and mount the bottle and torch heads to the back end of it. Pull it behind a four wheeler.
Be sure that the bottle is in a bracket so that it can not tip over. Not recommended to feed off of a propane bottle that is laying down. Although I can not remember the reasons why, something about liquid vs gas.

 

[ak diesel driver]

they make both horizontal and vertical bottles/tanks the horizontal ones would have more output before freezing up

 

[Stoney]

So no matter what it's going to take 3-4 years to make the ground usable? I assume your planning to plant a crop on it is your reasoning ?

 

[jrsavoie]

So no matter what it's going to take 3-4 years to make the ground usable? I assume your planning to plant a crop on it is your reasoning ?

3 years to be organic. We will plant every year. It just won't be organic, until 3 years have passed.
We did not plant this year because the tractor was down, couldn't find anybody to hire for such small acreage.

For what we were going to do, it wasn't worth renting a tractor. And it was a super wet spring.

 

[schiker]

I use a home made single burner and have a store bought one. Here is home made one.

 

[DieselAmateur]

Weed burning is great for specific rows. On 3 acres, that's a lot of propane!

I organically farm about 2 acres (not certified organic as the label doesn't mean anything to folks up here and it's not worth the paperwork but I digress) and have found the best weed control method to be minimal tillage and cover cropping. Winter rye is the king of cover crops. Granted I'm not row cropping, I'm growing diverse vegetables intensively. I use the biodegradable plastic mulch anywhere I can.

Something no till folks have been using for a few years now is tarping. You can get massive plastic tarps from hay suppliers. Throw some huge tarps on the field for 2-4 weeks. It will warm the soil, cause weed seeds to germinate, and then die as there is no light. Great way to "stale" the soil.

Another bonus of the tarping is keeping water off. Been raining a lot here in upstate NY for the past few weeks. I put down a 40'x100' tarp down where my 4000 or so garlic plants are to be planted in the next week. I'm curious to see how dry the soil is, and how much weed suppression worked. But I will definitely use the tarp method in the future, especially on crops like carrots that take 3 weeks to germinate and can quickly be overrun by weeds.

As a general rule, I find minimal tillage to be imperative for long term soil health. I only use the moldboard plow to turn a fallow field from sod to workable soil. After that it's strictly the disc and chisel plow and cultivator, nothing that will invert the soil. If you're spending more money on cover crops than seed crops, you're doing it right . Bare soil isn't natural, so weeds are nature's way of protecting herself. Do the job of the weeds and plant a diverse array of cover crops/ green manures. Happy to rant in more detail should it be requested

 

[schiker]

Ideas and thoughts:

Maybe make it a skid-mounted unit and put it on a trailer and take it on/off so it is not a single purpose trailer.

I would use some hard pipe and put some distance to the tank from burners so if you have a flame up you can turn the tank off and or master valve.

I have had a leak at the tank valve and it just flamed up a little. I could still turn off the tank but if a soft hose burnt through and a lot of gas was burning it might not be easy to shut off. Keep a big fire extinguisher on your pull vehicle.

Use some valves along each manifold runner far enough back so you can adjust the flames and light them individually with a long reach flame head burner like mine. Might be you have to light them slowly then fine tune each burner.

 

[schiker]

Good points Dieselamatuer. I box garden and use news paper and pine straw to control weeds. A farm down the road uses a lot of plastic.

I have used the burner in the garden and clearing some shore line where I can't use herbicide and it kills some stuff easy other not so easy. That video is young easy to kill stuff. It won't burn up full grown tough weeds unless you kill it and it dries out then try and burn it again. Some stuff still doesn't like to burn. Dog fennel is one. Unless you get it to lay over and get it hot clumped up. Other stuff is dangerous to burn like broom straw it lights and flies.

Might consider doing some control burn with a forestry drip torch and bushhog or disc fire breaks.

 

[schiker]

My home made torch has a regulator the store bought does not. I think a standard OPD valve will require some back pressure so you'll have to have some down stream control.

You probably will have to 2 stage regulate if you have a lot of torches.

Unless you copy a known design I think you should plan on a lot of adjustabilities. Might use some unitstrut or similar type of rail that you can adjust placement.


On the tarping you can build a frame with clear plastic put a brick between layers and it will super heat in summer and kill stuff. That is how Clemson Ag told my brother how to get rid of nematodes. Clear the ground and leave plastic on top to heat the dirt with a layer above to create a greenhouse affect. Leave for all summer or 2 and let the heat kill the nematodes (maybe along with no food too can't remember). Just killing grass and weeds might not take long. I killed some fescue with glass bowl in a few hours once in heat of summer.

Could you fertilize at the wrong time or too much fertilizer to burn new growth. Cut it low and heavy fertilize. Or are chemical fertilizers off the table with herbicides?

Lastly, have thought about "green" herbicides they look expensive for 3 acres but would be easiest to do.

 

[jrsavoie]

Thanks everybody for the info. We haven't found to much about the green herbicides.

We did find some organic rated fertilizer. It's going to be a learning experience the next few years.

Hopefully a profitable learning experience

 

[DieselAmateur]

What are you planning on growing?

Not to sound too jaded, but hard to profit in farming, all about the market. Being close to a major metropolitan area makes all the difference...

As far as organic fertilizer goes, pelletized chicken manure is absolute magic. 5-4-3 NPK applied at 1-1.5 tons per acre. Easy to work with, won't burn, doesn't smell that much, can't recommend it enough.

Take soil samples and send to a lab to get recommendations for everything from pH to cation exchange capacity to trace elements like boron. The soil is the plant's stomach, gotta give them a complete meal

 

[jrsavoie]

What are you planning on growing?

Not to sound too jaded, but hard to profit in farming, all about the market. Being close to a major metropolitan area makes all the difference...

As far as organic fertilizer goes, pelletized chicken manure is absolute magic. 5-4-3 NPK applied at 1-1.5 tons per acre. Easy to work with, won't burn, doesn't smell that much, can't recommend it enough.

Take soil samples and send to a lab to get recommendations for everything from pH to cation exchange capacity to trace elements like boron. The soil is the plant's stomach, gotta give them a complete meal

CBD.

 

[Stoney]

Although I'm personally against it , there is extreme profit in it. No offense ment ... I do hope you do well.

 

[BIGR]

CBD.

One of my neighbors across the creek is growing that, it's his first year at it. He started the plants out in a greenhouse. He probably has an acre or so of it.

There are some big growers in the area, not sure how true it is, but one man said that it costed ten thousand dollars just for the small plants to plant an acre?

 

[DieselAmateur]

All depends on the regulations for a given state, which affects cost of entering the market and doing business. Not too up to date on how it works here in NY, but last I heard one needed to own the plants from start to finish, as in a farmer has to do the growing and processing into a finished product.

Seeing as how there are a small number of quality plants/ genetics legally available, I imagine it could get pricey pretty quick to plant a large acreage. Depends on how the extraction is done too. If growing for high end flowers, then one has to buy in x number of female plants, all plants clones with proven genetics to meet the requirements for hemp. That's the most pricey route. If growing a large industrial hemp field where everything will go to seed and be processed into fiber, seeds/ oils and CBD from the leftover plant material, totally different story.

If growing for pure flowers @jrsavoie, see if you can get your hands on turkey manure for organic fertilizer. Higher in P and K relative to chicken manure, and is essential for the flowering stage of any plant.