|
| At the time I was working for Great Plains and trying to sell their "p" drills and planters. The farmers I worked with wanted to see the differences on a small scale before they jumped in whole hog to purchase an expensive piece of equipment. Trying to stay on the tilled row was a little problem. We tried to make the tilled strip as wide as we were comfortable with to accomadate for human driving error. If you have auto steer or can mount the planter to the strip till machine this should not be a problem.
As far as I know Great Plains Yield Pro and the Monsem planter are the only ones on the market that offer a twin row design. I have seen a couple of Kinze units modified to do this. Personally I would try to modifiy a Kinze. The GP is a little complicated having to have two different seed units for corn and beans. The orginal intent of the GP "P" drill was to be able to plant most all crops with one unit. i.e. beans, corn, wheat, barely, oats, rice, etc. not really good for sunflowers and edible beans tho. This was perfect for twin rows, all you had to do on a 7.5" drill was shut off every two rows and you had it made for corn. These units were very seed size sensitive and not too many of the farms that I talked to were that interested in planning that far ahead to make that work. The "P" drill then evolved into the yield pro planter with paired rows on 8" spacing using a finger pickup in corn and the same seed singulator from the "P" drill for soybeans and what ever else you wanted to plant. The yield pro still does not work that well in sunflowers and in large edible beans.
The Monsem is the best singulating planter on the market, it is very expensive and the longevity of the row units is suspect in anything but full tillage conditions. This planter is popular for carpet farming of truck crops not neccesarily the rough fields of a no till or strip till farmer, especially if you have pivot tracks. | |
|
strip till and twin rows
