Could down-force monitors have made this into a uniform field?
conventional down pressure) and there was nothing I could do about it, because I needed the down-force weight set on that row unit for the clay loam. “Ever since I went to this air-bag system that controls the weight on that row unit automatically,” he now reports, “the corn on my muck soils is coming out of the ground at the same time as the plants in the clay on the opposite end of the field.” The first time Millard had used a Precision Planting unit, he had gone for the SeedSense monitor. That was 2008, and in addition to checking his seed depth and speed, it gave him the actual weight readouts on the row units, although there was no way of controlling that weight individually. It wasn’t until the following year that he added the AirForce system, with its airbag sensors that automatically adjust the weight on each row unit, providing more uniform depth of planting and improved emergence. Now that he’s used it for a few years, Millard is finding that issues such as sidewall smearing, uneven emergence and hatchet roots on developing plants are greatly reduced. “I’m the type who will try it first, and if it’s not going to work, I don’t want to be selling the product,” says Millard, who regularly hosts workshops on the use of Precision Planting equipment, including one for beginners and another for those Corn Guide, February 2013
who have an AirForce or SeedSense unit (or both). “I tell my customers, ‘This monitor has a price tag on it, and the first few days, you will be overwhelmed by the information, but don’t let it get to you.’ That’s where I have to get them on the first day or two, to focus on a couple of issues, and that’s it, because you will be blown away by the information that’s there.” New insights into planting For Paul Sullivan, many of the advantages of the Precision Planting systems are summed up in the statement a customer of Millard’s made recently at a meeting in Avonmore. The farmer said that the technology got him off the planter to make adjustments that he wouldn’t otherwise have known to make until after the corn plant came up. “The things that I was seeing, that were costing my clients money in their corn stands, we’ve been able to reduce by using some of that technology that’s there, right now,” says Sullivan, citing seed placement as an important component of precision agriculture. “It makes sense because it gives them the opportunity to see what’s happening, not only with the seed that’s going in, but how it’s going in and what the environment is around the planting where that seed is going. As farms are amalgamated and fields get bigger, there’s such variation in the soil con-
ditions at planting time, that this technology allows us to have some ability to see what changes might be made to the seed that’s placed in the ground. “These bigger planters that are out there, guys just aren’t getting off to do anything to the planters,” Sullivan says. “The reality is they have to go, and this technology is giving them an idea of how things are going in the field before they get a lot of acres planted.” The technology has the ability to consider, monitor and adjust to parameters in the soil, on the machine and across the field that growers have never really been able to control before, and it is providing fresh insights into the planting process. According to Sullivan, in Millard’s first year with the SeedSense unit, the monitor told him he needed a lot of down pressure to compensate for tighter soils due to the amount of frost in the ground. The next year, the SeedSense monitor told him that he had far too much down pressure on the row units, all because the ground was mellower. The effects of sidewall smearing are also something Sullivan points to as justification for the investment in down-pressure adjustment and monitoring down force. One year, one of his clients had a problem with every field where the seed slots had reopened. How much yield is lost because of excessive down pressure leading to sidewall smearing? Continued on page 18
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