Finally! I had someone put down 2,250 lbs of lime per acre. That's what the extension office analysis recommended. It's not everyday that I have 9 Tons of lime applied, so I took some pictures of the guy from Ranch & Grove Spreader Service using his 1989 Mertz-Tyler with a 3208 Cat engine and 10 speed roadranger transmission. With this machine he can easily do 500 acres a day. It was fun to watch, but you have to watch out for flying lime chunks! They sting just a little!
I'm curious as to what the cost was. Wow, that seems like a lot of lime/acre. I've got a feeling my ext. office will be telling me something similar. I have about five acres I'd like to fertilize/lime this summer (maybe only a pasture field at a time) and am thinking about renting/buying a spreader for the 3-point and doing it myself, although that much lime would prob. take forever w/ a 3-point spreader!!
Sadly, it will cost more to do less than 20 acres. I paid about $30 per acre at 2,250 lbs per acre. They order it by the truckload then load it into the spreader. Overall, when you have less it cost them more in fuel to drive there than they make on spreading it, so they charge more when they have less than 20 acres to do.
Although, there is no way I would have tried to buy 50lb bags of lime to load into my 500 lb spreader. Think about loading all those bags then you would have to make 4 passes on a 1 acre plot!!! Too much work, and it would have cost me alot more money to do it myself. This was definately the cheaper route.
The going rate for a square bale of hay in this area is $5.00 !!!! If I go to Georgia, it goes down to $3.25. 800lb round bales go for $40-$50 !!!! We live too close to Mickey Mouse, so they get away with charging us the tourist price [img]/forums/images/icons/laugh.gif[/img]
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