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| Bosses dad has a duck lake that we plant for him every year. For last 7-8 years, instead of hiring a planter to come in which gets spendy for the small acreage, I've been drilling the corn with a plain ol' grain drill. Now we have a JD 1590 so I used it this year and tryed some no-till corn and some minimum till corn.
For a duck lake, this method works just fine. I planted on 15" spacings, and the skips and doubles, triples dont hurt anything for the ducks to navigate. However for a cash crop, this method may not be viable yet. Even for silage, earlage, or any livestock feed, you have to have as even an emergence as you can get. The quality of feed will suffer greatly if you have emergence over a 10 day period as will the yeild if it gets that bad. Main reason for the issue will be the metering with the drill. If oyu had a drill sitting around and dont want to buy a planter, find a way to tape, wire and chewing gum some planter meters to it and you're in business IMO. The openers will work, but the drills metering system just dont pan for corn well enough. I try to order the smallest round seed I can get for the duck lake, but it still has serious issues with spacings. The longer the distance the seed has to travel to get to the soil, the worse it is. With the old standard drills, I had better spacings, but needed to work the soil to cover the seed.
The fluted meter is just as some here describe it, a "controlled spill". I have places with 4-5 seeds dropped in the same spot.
If you are going to sell the feed from a drill corn crop, you likely wont sell it to the same customer twice. With the ability today to have nearly same day emergence, which translates to best quality feed and highest yeild, some sort of planter will be a good investment. Either that or a set of meters from a planter and extra attention tot he closer setup on the drill. JMO
 (6-14-09 035.jpg)
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 6-14-09 035.jpg (121KB - 461 downloads)
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Corn for silage using a grain drill...
