Food Processing Residuals in Pennsylvania: What Farms Need to Know
If your operation is considering accepting FPR, or if you’re already accepting it and want to make sure you’re on solid ground, a few things need to be in place.
Everyone talks about pump size and toolbar width when they spec a dragline system. Those matter. But the piece that decides how long the day actually takes is the hose reel. A good reel deploys the drag hose fast at the start of a field, recovers it fast at the end, and moves cleanly between fields. A bad reel, or the wrong reel for the job, adds hours to every application day.
For anyone building out a dragline system, adding capacity to an existing one, or replacing a reel that isn’t keeping up, this is a guide to sizing and setting up a manure hose reel for the way you actually operate.
A hose reel handles the drag hose and mainline hose. On a dragline system, the drag hose is the flexible, abrasion-resistant line that connects the mainline hose (running from the pump) to the application toolbar. The drag hose is what actually trails the tractor through the field. The reel stores the hose, deploys it into the field at the start of a set, and reels it back in when the set is done.
Without a reel, moving a mile of six-inch hose is a job for a crew, a truck, and most of a morning. With a reel, one operator can deploy or recover the same hose in a few passes, and can move a whole reel of hose to the next field on a trailer or skid loader without breaking down the run.
Hose reels sit in the manure dragline lineup alongside the PTO pump and application toolbars like the 50 foot dribble bar and the dragline injectors. All of these have to be sized together. A pump that can supply six-inch hose paired with a reel sized for four-inch hose gives you a system that can’t run at rated capacity.
Three questions determine what reel you need.
The first question is footage. Hose length is driven by how far your application implement typically has to work from the pump or riser. If your fields are close and your runs are short, you may only need a few hundred feet of supply plus the drag hose. If you’re running longer distances from the pump, you might need up to a mile.
Hoover Ag’s 66HR hose reel is built to handle up to 4,000 ft of hose, which covers most smaller dragline setups. If your typical run is well under that, you might be better off with the smaller skid loader reel, which is sized for shorter deployments and mounts directly to a skid loader for maximum flexibility.
Drag hose diameters typically run from four inches to ten inches. Bigger hose moves more manure at lower friction loss, which matters on longer pulls or when you’re pushing high volume for injection. Smaller hose is lighter, easier to handle, and adequate for shorter surface application runs.
Your reel has to be sized for the hose you’re running. A reel built around four-inch hose won’t hold much six-inch hose, and a reel built for ten-inch hose is oversized (and more expensive) than necessary if you’re only running four.
Reel selection is also about total system range. If your pump sits at a pit and the far edge of your field is a mile away, the mainline hose covers most of that distance, but the drag hose still has to reach from the pump-side headland to the far end of every run. Total drag hose footage should exceed the longest field diagonal you’re likely to work, plus enough slack for turns and headland handling.
Long-run operations often build in extra capacity. Custom applicators running multiple fields per day may spec more hose than any single field needs, because the extra footage means fewer swaps between fields.
The two Hoover Ag reels represent the two common approaches.
The 66HR hose reel is a full-size, high-capacity trailer-mounted reel. It’s what you want if you’re running significant hose footage, working larger fields, or moving between multiple fields per day. It handles up to a mile of hose, moves down the road behind a truck or tractor, and gives you the capacity to work an entire field without breaking the run to reposition. Custom applicators, larger dairy operations, and anyone doing significant dragline volume ends up with a reel in this class.
The skid loader reel is a smaller, more mobile option that mounts directly on a skid loader. It’s built for shorter runs and tighter operations, and its advantage is that it goes wherever the skid loader can go. It’s the right choice for smaller operations or as a supplemental reel for a bigger operation that needs field-side flexibility. The full hose reel lineup covers both.
Some operations end up with one of each. The big reel handles the main hose deployment and recovery, the small reel handles the last-mile handling and short-run applications.
A few problems show up over and over.
Undersizing the reel to save money. A reel built for less hose than you actually run means either you over fill it and risk damaging hose, or you leave the extra hose in the field and hope it comes home in one piece. Either way, it costs more time than the reel itself saves.
No plan for reel movement between fields. If your reel is trailer-mounted and the next field doesn’t have easy access, you have a problem. Plan reel moves the same way you’d plan pump moves.
Skipping the hose mover. On any field bigger than a small square, a hose mover pays for itself in one day. It repositions the hose between passes so the tractor isn’t dragging line across freshly applied ground.
If you’re building or upgrading a dragline system, work the sizing questions in this order:
Do it in that order and you end up with a system that runs at rated capacity. Do it in a different order and you end up with a bottleneck somewhere.
The hose reel is the piece of a dragline system that most directly affects how much of the application day you spend working versus setting up. Get it sized correctly and it disappears into the operation. Undersize it or set it up wrong, and it becomes the constraint that decides how much you can actually apply.
If you want help sizing a reel to your setup, look at the 66HR hose reel and skid loader reel, or the full hose reel category. Both are part of the Hoover Ag manure equipment lineup that includes matching pumps, dribble bars, and injectors, so the whole system can be spec’d together.
Call us at (610) 468-9666 or get in touch if you want to walk through your operation. We’d rather help you spec it right than sell you the wrong reel.
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