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| What may work there won't work everywhere. I would imagine you have a lot more days available to plant and bigger fields which is more efficient.
We intended to plant 1200 acres of corn with a 16 row. We had been planting beans with it also, but went to an air drill this year. We got 600 planted inbetween the rains before it got too late for corn which in my case I used the cut off of 4 weeks after our optimum planting date. After that we returned the corn seed and went to beans. As of now we've still got 300 acres of beans to plant, some on land that has not been dry since before the first of April. In this area if we don't get the corn in early enough we end up hitting a real hot dry spell that really cuts yields.
In big fields you can get a lot of acres in a hurry, but we've got a lot of ground with terraces and we have to farm that on the contour. Where we can easily plant 250 acres without headlights in our bottoms in the hill the same day might not get you 160. We can run some 20 hour days, but to figure on running 24/7 with a planter is unreasonalbe for us because we don't have enough qualified operators, something else would have to sit.
The last 4 years we have wanted to plant more corn than we got in the ground. The limiting factor every year was the number of days available to plant because of excessive rain. We're not ready to trade planters, but our next one will likely be a 24 row. | |
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Acres needed for 24 row Planter
