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Leesburg, Ohio | FWIW, we have a Meridian 375 tender with the self-fill conveyor, and all the bells and whistles. We like everything about it except we hardly ever use the self-fill feature. If I were to replace it, I would pass on the self-fill...very expensive, and very awkward and hard to handle.
Have to man-handle the conveyor into position under the hopper every time to go from transport to filling the planter, if the conveyor is in full transport position. We usually just leave it in planter-fill position under the hopper, but that makes it set higher for transport, and it hangs out to the side a bit over the truck bed towards oncoming traffic, so we have to be very careful when transporting that way. Sure makes it easier to use, tho, by leaving it in planter fill position...all remote hydraulic controlled.
Maybe the self-fill feature on the brands you mention are easier to use, but we found we never use it. We do have a separate electric Batco conveyor to fill the tender from hopper tanks or wagons, and we just dump boxes and bags over the top with the forklift. We thought we would like using the self-fill conveyor when loading from pro-boxes in the shop, but it just creates too much dust, and scatters seed around the floor where it bounces out of the conveyor hopper. The conveyor hopper on the J&M and UM we looked at was very long and flat-sloped, and would have been even worse.
We considered buying a Killbros tender this year for a second unit, with the direct belt drive on the bottom of the conveyor...about half the cost of our big one or the ones you are looking at. Ended up finding a fairly cheap used two-box Friesian for pro-boxes that will do us just fine this year for corn, as a second unit. No scales, but we seldom split a box of corn anyway. If we need to, we can use the big tender.
I do not like the auger type units...we have had augers in the past, and sometimes have considerable seed damage with an auger, especially lots of splits in beans.
JMHO... | |
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Seed tender
