You may be tempted to guess at how much chemical to apply on your land. After all, do you really want to go through the math to figure out exactly how much land you have? That sounds like work- but it’s not really!
Quite simply, precision is critical to getting the right amount of your fertilizer, seed, or whatever it is you are applying. Under- or over- applying means wasted money on your chemical, and less than optimum growth/kill rates on your vegetation. Or you might even kill and maim what you want to grow through over application- it happens! But the best part is, it’s not hard to convert your acreage to other measurements you can work with easily, even if math wasn’t your favorite subject.
The basic numbers to convert your land to acres are: one acre is 4840 square yards, 43560 square feet or about 4047 square meters. So, if your land is measured in feet, here’s your simple calculation: take the length times the width of your plot in feet, and divide by the number of square feet in an acre, or 43,560.
(l x w)/43,560 = area
So if your land is 250 feet by 3000 feet, we get:
(250 x 3000)/43,560 = 17.21 acres
If your land is calculated in square yards, use the 4840 yardage divisor instead of 43,560, if it’s in square meters, use 4047. Often land is not an exact square, so you’ll need to divide into square or rectangular chunks you can calculate separately and add up. Don’t fret if you have use a triangle- a triangle is nothing more than half a square. So when you multiply length by width, divide that in half. Simple, right?
Of course, there’s more that goes into precision spraying than determining acreage. Those will be covered in later posts.