A simple hand spreader is often the best tool for applying granular fertilizer or pesticides.

Most professional applicators use rotary spreaders. Rotary spreaders are not only faster than drop spreaders, but are more forgiving of small errors in swath width.

Rotary broadcast spreaders offer many advantages for turf professionals. There are also some disadvantages including pattern skewing and the need to develop pattern settings for each product to center the pattern. Pendulum-action spreaders overcome those problems.

People tend to walk at different speeds. When you are pushing a spreader, this difference in walking speed can cause problems.

Some high-quality plastic spreaders have precision equivalent to the better homeowner metal spreaders. There is a tremendous difference in performance among brands and models.

A good lawn spreader is a precision tool and should be treated accordingly. Your lawn spreader doesn’t need a great deal of time-consuming maintenance, but a few simple steps can preserve the life and precision of your spreader.

Walk-behind lawn spreaders are designed to be pushed, not pulled. The delivery rate from drop spreaders and the pattern from rotary spreaders are distorted if a spreader is pulled backward.

Drop spreaders are best suited to small lawns where you want uniform patterns or have many obstacles to trim around. Rotary spreaders are generally best for large, open areas.

In some situations, a hand-cranked spreader is more practical than a wheeled model. When spreading granules in nurseries, beds of flowers and ornamentals, and other restricted areas, a wheeled spreader can be difficult or impossible to use. Hand- or strap-carried, hand-cranked spreaders are a viable option in such cases.

If you want to apply granular products correctly, you will need to use the correct spreader pattern setting, swath width, and rate setting. This article will tell you how to achieve this.

When you buy a bag of fertilizer or granular pesticide to spread on your lawn, it will usually have a label on the back of the bag with settings for several common fertilizer spreaders. Do you know where those settings come from, how they were developed or how reliable they are?

Some rotary spreaders can deliver a reasonably uniform distribution pattern with some products, but not with others, and some homeowner rotary spreaders don’t deliver a good pattern with any product.

Rotary spreaders offer the advantages of wide, fast coverage and forgiving patterns, but they are not well suited to working along turf edges. Some spreaders offer a pattern cut-off mechanism to address this problem.

Spreader.EZ is a computer program that allows you to analyze the patterns from broadcast fertilizer spreaders, determine the uniformity of the patterns, and select the effective swath width.

A relatively new class of products in the commercial grounds maintenance industry is the self-propelled spreader and/or sprayer. This kind of equipment can potentially reduce the effort required to apply fertilizer or pesticides to lawns, but it comes at a substantial cost and will require some trade-offs in operating mode.

The more you learn about lawn spreaders, the more you realize how complicated they really are. The LSU AgCenter has published a bulletin that summarizes 24 years of research on spreaders.

Some spreader experts and some spreader and granular material operating instructions advise you to go over your lawn twice when spreading fertilizer or granular products, with the two trips over the lawn made at right angles to each other. Don’t do it!

Most turf fertilizers contain controlled-release nitrogen fertilizer. There are two types of controlled-release fertilizer and one type can be damaged by your spreader.

To obtain the best results from your granular fertilizers and pesticides, you have to apply them at the correct rate. One easy step you can take to help assure that your spreader delivers the correct rate of material is to calibrate your spreader.

The information should make it easier for anyone using a fertilizer spreader to select an appropriate type of spreader and to obtain optimum performance from the selected spreader. This bulletin summarizes 24 years of design, study, research and teaching about fertilizer spreaders.