P
Clemson delves into variable depth digging Harvest Guidebook
otentiometers, a hydraulic top link and a depth gauge are some of the key components for an on-thego variable depth digging system being developed by researchers at Clemson University. The Clemson team is working on the project with Amadas Industries under an agreement that would grant Amadas the rights to market the jointly developed technology. Joe Boddiford of Sylvania, Georgia, and his son Knapp Boddiford have used the Clemson system to dig peanuts on their farm. Knapp says he used it to dig about 350 acres with a six-row KMC digger. Knapp says, “An experienced farmer might be able to dig peanuts as efficiently as this system, but this technology should really help operators who are less qualified and less experienced in digging.” Knapp likes the Clemson system because it didn’t require any major adjustments to the existing digger. He found the system easy to use, even with a laptop computer in the tractor cab providing the digging depth data. He also likes that the system can be moved from one digger to another with little extra work. Kendall Kirk, Clemson ag engineer at the Edisto Research and Education Center near Blackville, South Carolina, helped to develop Clemson’s variable depth digger. Kirk believes the system could become
12
Andrew Warner (left), Clemson University area agronomic agent, and Joe Boddiford (center), farmer from Sylvania, Ga., discuss the components of the Clemson research on variable depth digging to attendees at the 2014 Georgia Peanut Tour.
commercially available after a few more years of testing. Kirk says the research could be speeded up if he were able to conduct additional testing in Australia. He started out testing the system on a two-row digger, and has since added the technology to six-row diggers. He installed one depth gauge on the two-row digger and two depth gauges on the sixrow digger. He hasn’t yet installed the system on a flexible frame digger, in part because he believes the payback time would be much longer. Soil moisture also has a bearing on results. Kirk says more peanuts are saved by the variable blade depth during dry conditions. Kirk envisions that the system could be used as an option to buy
Southeastern Peanut Farmer July/August 2016
for new diggers or as a retrofit farmers could purchase separately for use on existing diggers. He hopes the system could be easily added to existing peanut diggers, regardless of which brand of digger growers use. If the Clemson system is priced at $5,000 per digger, Kirk says it should pay for itself after 200 acres if a farmer is able to save 100 pounds of peanuts per acre and if peanuts are priced at 25 cents per pound. In the original Clemson tests, Kirk and his colleagues used maps for soil electrical conductivity as generated by a Veris implement. With the Veris maps, soil texture was divided into three categories depending on sand and clay content, and the digging was set at an ideal depth for each of the three categories. t
BY JOHN LEIDNER