Be very careful

A lot of things change when you start getting into the 10 mph and beyond type of speeds.

As the speed of the planter goes up and up you have to start thinking of it as more of a suspension system and less as a simply a down pressure system.

There are a couple key points I want to summarize.

1. most people you hear of doing "high speed" planting are doing either conventional tillage or strip till
2. doing conventional tillage or strip till will remove a large amount of the need for "active down pressure"
3. There are No-Till situations where you can have the planter run as smooth or smoother than a bad job of conventional tillage.
4. From an automatic down pressure control perspective, if you are doing conventional tillage or strip tillage doing a bad job of it can be worse than not doing it at all.
5. In No-Till, staying between the rows is EVERYTHING. Or if you are in bean stubble going directly over the top of the old bean row will give you quasi controlled traffic
6. interestingly it was always thought that down pressure requirements increase with the SQUARE of speed. I no longer believe this is the case.
7. At 10-12 mph in corn stalks you can actually make the row unit hop off the ground by crossing the old row.

We have created and shown a next generation down pressure concept that addresses some of these issues.

Basically what we are doing is replacing the strain gauge with a unique gauge wheel load sensor that takes some of the function that is typically done electronically and does it mechanically. So we are measuring the gauge wheel load as a hydraulic pressure. The system is completely rigid normally but has the ability to absorb some force on the gauge wheels when the force becomes high enough, typically at high speed. This gives the planter row unit a suspension of sorts.

This sensor is coupled with a next generation digital down pressure control system that allows you to have the motion of the row unit very heavily damped, yet not apply very high down force.

This link is to a video from our testing last fall comparing the system in corn stalks to a competitive system. We have previously published some of this video. We are going to make some of the X-Sense devices for this spring in limited quantity but we aren't totally sure how or when we are going to bring this technology to market.

 https://dawnequipment.wistia.com/medias/nnkzmcfkof