How heavy is your slurry tanker?

With slurry tankers getting bigger and bigger on a yearly basis, it is interesting to see what weight these behemoths become when filled with brown gold.

A very simple way of looking at it is to use the fact that a litre of water has a mass of 1kg. S0 every thousand litres of liquid in the tank has a mass of 1t. Chances are that the weight of each load is significantly different as the fibrous content will lower the weight and any sandy type material mixed in the liquid will raise the weight.

So even with the best agitation, there will still be differences in load weight but for the purpose of this article we will go with the standard 1kg/litre. Back a few years ago when the tank sizes were smaller than today, a 2,000-gallon tanker was a big tank.

A tank of this size full of liquid would weigh around 9t not including the metal in the actual tank. Not an insignificant mass to be towing either on the road or on your precious and easily damaged soil.

In recent years, 3,500-gallon tankers have become a quite common sight on the roads and these can hold around 15t of slurry. Along with a possible tanker weight of approximately 5t (depending on manufacturer), this brings the full tanker up to a massive 20t. That is not something that should be driven across your most valued asset, your land.

In a lot of cases, these tankers are now only used to ferry the liquid to umbilical systems which have a much lighter footprint on the ground but there are situations where tankers of this size and bigger are brought out on to land and the damage done is seen for years to follow.

During 2017, two of the main tanker manufacturers produced 6,000-gallon tanks, admittedly all for foreign and presumably drier climates, but the figures for this size of tank make for eye watering reading. The tankers alone must weigh 7-8t and with a payload of over 27t this gives a total pull behind the tractor of 35t. These tankers certainly have no place on most of the land in Ireland. Going by the rate of tanker expansion, it wont be long until someone somewhere orders a 10,000-gallon machine. This would hold 45t or more of liquid. I may have finally found a job for the Fendt 1050.