Don’t Let Air Seeder Blockages Ruin Your Farm’s Profit Potential By Intelligent Ag Solutions
TJ Wanken had just seeded his first 100 acres of yellow peas with his air drill when he discovered he had a problem. “When I went to fill up, I realized I had one full primary run blocked through the whole 100 acres,” says the Shelby, Mont., grower. “This was essentially about a $5,000 error.” Every farmer with an air seeder has to deal with blockages. Unfortunately, there’s only so much a grower can do to prevent them from happening. Blockages can be caused by things like animals, objects that fall out of a farmer’s pocket, like a pen, chunks of fertilizer, seed treatments, even barometric pressure. The consequences of these blockages can be costly. “Anywhere a farmer has a blockage, they are going to have yield loss,” says Dan Gustafson, Product Manager for Intelligent Ag™. “Because they either are not getting seeds, fertilizer, or both in the ground.” Air seeder blockages also reduce crop uniformity and increase the chance for weeds. If it’s severe enough, a farmer may have to reseed a field,
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which is an additional cost in fuel, seed, equipment, time and labor. That’s what Wanken ended up doing. He bought more certified yellow pea seed, which cost around $45 an acre, and reseeded those 100 acres. That’s when he realized a blockage monitoring system could pay for itself in just a season or two.
Why Acoustic Sensing is the Most Accurate Since prevention isn’t really an option, the best solution is to catch blockages as soon as possible. But it’s important to pick a system that a farmer can rely on to detect blockages quickly and accurately. One option are optical sensors that detect product flow visually. The problem with them is they’re susceptible to notifying growers of false blockages when the sensors get dirty, which can be caused by impregnated fertilizer or even just dust from the seed. Another blockage monitor is piezoelectric systems, which use vibrations to sense fertilizer and seed. But the challenge with these is that often the entire piece of equipment is vibrating, so it can be
difficult for the sensors to tell where a vibration is coming from. It also requires a lot of wires to power the sensors and collect data from them. Then there is an acousticsensing system. “If you think of a stethoscope that a doctor uses, it’s identical to that,” Gustafson says. “We use a hollow tube coming from the sensor. As product contacts the membrane, a sound wave is produced that travels through the tube to an ECU. Based on the frequency signals, we can determine not only if you have product flowing, but also if you have reduced product flow, so we can catch blockages much earlier.” Intelligent Ag’s Recon Blockage Plus™ is the only acoustic-sensing blockage monitor available on the market.