Ash Nicholson
Bay of Plenty, New Zealand
This story was filmed in 2026 and reflects one farmer’s own experience with their Tow and Fert. Every farm is different, so please treat it as a story rather than a forecast for your place.
Getting a ground drench under the kiwifruit canopy
Ash Nicholson is co-founder and CEO of Bay Nutrients, a Bay of Plenty company that makes and supplies Flamingro™, a chitin-based biostimulant for horticulture. Ash works with kiwifruit, vegetable, viticulture and pasture growers. He uses and recommends a Multi 500 with the Hort/Tree Crop Kit to apply Flamingro.
At the moment, we’re supplying about 3,000 hectares, across the country and growing pretty quickly.
A powder that has to go on the ground
Flamingro is a dry powder that doesn’t dissolve. In mature orchards it goes on as a ground drench, onto the orchard floor rather than up into the vines. Kiwifruit orchards have no shortage of sprayers, but most of them are big machines built for foliar work.
What Ash needed was the opposite: something that puts product on the ground, small enough to work in under the canopy and light enough to go where a big sprayer shouldn’t.
So we needed to find a piece of equipment that could effectively put it on the ground, and cost-effectively do so, using a light bit of equipment that can get in underneath the canopy.
The weight matters most in spring. By September some blocks are soft after rain.
… some of those trickier parts of orchards that are wet or low-lying, and where you wouldn’t want to put a big, heavy five-ton sprayer into in September after some rain.
Trying a Multi 500
Ash took on a Multi 500 for Flamingro product trials and applications, mostly in kiwifruit. It did the job, and he has stuck with it.
The Multi 500 has its own petrol engine for the pump and the agitation, so it takes nothing from whatever is towing it. Ash runs his behind a side-by-side or a quad, and says a small tractor does the job too. The Hort/Tree Crop Kit adds a tree crop attachment for orchard work and keeps the pasture nozzle.
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Learning it by feel
Ash describes it as a very simple sprayer, with no software to calibrate. He sees that as the point.
It’s a very basic bit of kit, and I think that’s part of the beauty of it, is that you can really get a good feel of how to spray.
His routine is water first, then the product for the area he’s doing, then a nozzle to suit the lie of the land.
So if it’s a nice flat orchard, we can use the 20 litre a minute nozzles and comfortably spray two hectares in 12 minutes of spray time.
The Multi 500 holds fine particle products in suspension, and its re-circulation boom stops product settling out in dead spots. Ash has found it handles a range of ground drench products, not just his own.
Keeping it running
Between trials and applications, Ash has put a lot of ground under the machine over the last year.
I’ve sprayed about 1,800 to 2,000 hectares in the last 12 months, and the maintenance has been almost none. … We replace the oil in that pump every 50 hours, and other than that, I’ve just replaced a couple of nozzles, mainly because I lost a few or we’ve just worn a few out.
Why he points customers to it
Ash has a product of his own to get on the ground, and the Multi 500 is the machine his team uses to do it. He sees kiwifruit putting more focus on the ground, with more ground-applied and biological products going on under the canopy.
So it’s the one that we recommend out to all of our customers if they’re looking to get into our product and more ground-applied inputs.
