There's a surprising amount of options out there in the market for the simple task of spreading things around on the ground, whether it's salt, sand, seed, whatever it is that you have to broadcast, there's a number of different implements out there in order to get that done. I've got a handful of selections for drop spreaders to go in the back of a tractor but today we're going to talk about these two different types of broadcast spreaders. The Land Pride here one is an FSP1000. Now, these guys are generally going to be sold with several different options as far as the size of the hopper cone. When you go through it, you look at your different model numbers, there's a 500, a 700, and a 1000, that's really telling you the amount of capacity that these things are going to have while the under portion of these, the frame and the spinner assembly are all exactly the same from one to the next. 

These are really, really inexpensive pieces and do a very simple function. You have that PTO shaft coming out of the back of your tractor that's going to run that spinner spreader a gate down on the bottom to vary the rate coming out of the bottom. That spinner is simply going to take all that material and broadcast it and chuck it on the ground. The faster your PTO is going, the faster that disc is spinning, the wider area that is going to broadcast it over. That's very different though than say this spreader over here. This spreader would be really well known under the Vicon brand. Several years ago Kubota bought out the Kverneland group which included Vicon, so Kubota is now actually the owner of this technology and you're able to buy these things now in Kubota Orange. 

There are still some of those Vicon ones floating around out there. It is the same technology and the same product. There's a really shocking amount of engineering that's gone into these little spreaders so while the cone on top in here looks much like the other ones do, the spreading mechanism on the bottom is very, very different. 

This guy can be hydraulically operated to open the gate and change your rates but the real business end of this and what really determines how all that material goes down onto the ground is the spout down here on the bottom. The cool thing about these spouts are that there are dozens of options of different types of spouts. The engineering that has gone into something as simple as that spout is really impressive. You've seen pictures and stuff before of large warehouses where they had these things moving back and forth on mechanical systems to measure how different spout designs are going to distribute things down onto the ground. You can go through and buy spouts that are going to put materials to the left or the right and not in the middle or only to throw it to one side. It gives you a lot more flexibility of how you're putting things down on the ground. If you're spreading something that's a little bit more of a high-value product, say seed or you're putting something down that you really need to be able to control where it goes. 

In this case, this is going out to a snow contractor who's going to do salt and so he has a spout down here on the bottom that doesn't broadcast quite as far because he just wants to lay it down onto a sidewalk. To try to do that same thing with the spinner spreader like this, there's no way you're going to be able to make that material drop down into that small area. 

A little spout like this helps control exactly where that's going to go. This big spout right here is actually the stock one that comes on these units and is going to throw it over a much, much larger area. That's just a little bit on these different spreaders and like you can see outside of the hopper here themselves, there's very few differences when you get down to the actual mechanical portions of this machine. You can guess there is quite a cost difference here. You can literally buy two or more of these simple Land Pride spreaders compared to the cost of one of these more mechanically complex ones. Their functionality and the kind of work that they're able to do is actually quite different. 

If you're in the market for a piece of equipment or if you have parts of service needs for machines you've already got, give us a call at Messick's. We're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com