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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

The spreader settings typically found on bags of fertilizer and granular pesticides are usually based on tests performed on one sample of each spreader model listed. This procedure assumes that all spreaders of that model are identical and will thus require the same spreader settings. Unfortunately, that is not often the case – at least with homeowner spreaders.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.