EC MN - Hour North of 'The Cities' | I would think the PTO pump would be great to reduce the amount of hydralic flow you would need from the tractor hydraulic system to run the planter, vac and air cart. We decided to go with finger pick-up on our 1770NT so we wouldn't have to continually be using hydraulics to run a vac system and save the life on our pump. Sometimes I see the advantage to having a vac to run at a slightly faster speed and to have a slightly better stand, but the finger pickup does what it needs for us.
We run liquid starter on our planter with a 500 gallon tank on the main frame. Because of this we wouldn't be able to mount dry boxes on the frame because of the narrow transport width. I have heard of people mounting a large box where the 500 gallon liquid tank would be on the fram and then blow the dry fertilizer from the box to the openers mounted on the row units. I like this idea of bulk fill, but then I would have to go with saddle tanks on the Cat for the starter, but I would like to have saddles to apply herbicide when I plant. Wil-Rich makes saddle tanks that can be used as dry fertilizer or liquid and then just have to route the hoses back to the planter. In our area we don't have large square fields, so I would be backing up quite often and this would make having a cart behind a little more difficult. We also use an air system to fill the planter boxes from the rear which might become a problem if I had an air cart behind.
I know Flexi-Coil made a couple of air carts that had a 3 point mounted on the rear and could be towed in between the tractor and planter, but once again may be difficult to back up easily unless the planter was mounted.
Lance |
corn planter with dry fertilizer
