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| I place a lot more emphasis on good seed to soil contact than perfect spacing when it comes to doing a good job of planting. Therefore I have pretty much ignored all of the glamorous claims associated with the high speed planting options from Precision Planting and now John Deere.
No-till fields are often pretty rough and have a fair amount of variability. The best way to ensure decent seed to soil contact has been to slow down. You make a good slice for the seed. You get the seed into the bottom of the trench. You close the trench well. You manage down pressure to keep the openers at the right depth without creating too much compaction with the gauge wheels.
With all of that being said, I wonder if it may be very possible to go faster and still do a better job than I'm currently doing with airbags if I were to have hydraulic downpressure that was automatically adjusting fow by row. Perhaps I could do better at 7 mph than I'm currently doing at 5.2 mph? If so, then I could start to see the need for better singulation and keeping the seed from rolling and bouncing when it hits the ground.
Some concerns I would have:
1. Being able to open the trench and close the trench as cleanly with everything happening fast
2. Breaking openers because of more force being applied against them with the higher speeds. We already break plenty of openers because of having single disk fertilizer openers
3. Row unit bounce due to the rough terrain
So have any of you no-till guys pursued planting at high speed? How has it treated you? Thanks. | |
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Any no-till guys on the high speed planting band wagon?
