Planter / drill

[farmaholic]

Yes Furrow keep posting! Your posts get me thinking of how I can improve things around here and find them valuable.
I sure can't help but notice that the people that are dry and want rain real bad sure have nice looking canola!

Ah-hem, ah-hem.....I posted about the best looking spot. Read the post about the bi-polar emotional roller coaster.....

But if that's directed at me thanks for the complement.

Take care.

[tweety]

Canola not so much , unless you sole intent is selling seed and fungicide . Then ya , keeping seed rates higher on narrow row spacing is a win win for you. Not so much for the grower

Regarding canola, maybe go back read the research. As the row spacing got wider, the yield went down. No matter how many posts you make, that won't change.

Absolutely its great to post "new" ideas, but the corn planter with canola idea has yet to show a benefit. Trend or not. Once flea beetles take a pound, frost another pound, cutworms another pound, that 2 pounds of seed you saved looks pretty expensive. Let alone the additional passes you need to make to fertilize, the disturbance, the erosion, moisture loss, the eq time, the....

[Rareearth]

For canola the paralink systems are awesome(seedmaster/seedhawk), when there is abundant moisture ( within 1/4 inch of the soil surface) . The problem with these drills is the maximum depth you can seed, which is roughly 1 inch of soil over the seed. In hot dry hurricane winds the germ can be iffy in places. Add they don't like trash or straw ( the old beaver huts ). So if you do seed and get a depth of 1 inch soil over the seed the ground dries out much faster due to the fert opener below the seed, plus salt of fert effect ( drying). Again if it's 1 inch deep then a driving windy rain, the furrow sides wash over the seed and ... - then it's two inches deep with a crust starting to form on the soil surface.

No machine is perfect, they all have a place, complexity, weather conditions, field finish,calibrations, etc etc

I do like the though provoking ideas, and thoughts on the forums, it's a big part of why I do what I do.

[sumdumguy]

Furrow, I will be disappointed if you quit joining us. Please don't let one comment affect the great posts you share here. I've taken a few jabs but I just say, "good thing I don't need to kiss his arse". Click your heels and post on👍. Sometimes words just come across wrong, but we gotta test the water.

[bucket]

Like I tell my kids.....be the bigger person.... there will always be naysayers or people that don't agree but that's what makes it all worth reading....

[sawfly1]

great thread , thanks furrow , we always knew narrow in wheat was good.
4 inch was the best 30 years ago.
neighbour is starting to make me look bad, again , just beautiful crops.
he is done spraying , today spraying some magic potion ,
i assume liquid fert.

need guys like that to sharpen our game.

but my 3310 bour. gives me good results , in spite of me .
almost foolproof. not a lot precision here , cold as it was , should have been shallower, just lots of fert. and hope for the best. kinda works out . most of the time .
what i did notice is, had different canola varieties , side by side , one with lubriderm, one without
like night and day.
i did not fry the canola with too much phos, it was bugs that thinned it out
more than twice the stand

[tweety]

Craig's conclusion after 3 years:

"The big question mark is whether a precision drill is worth the expenditure, especially in an environment where it’s exclusively used for canola seeding,” said Shaw. “As you move further south into country that grows corn, sugar beets and soy, you’d have more acres you could use that kind of planter on, so it would be easier to warrant that additional expense. But up here, it’s a significant cost when you can only use it for a single crop.”.

His three-year on-farm trial now complete, Shaw has returned the borrowed planter to the Lacombe research station — and isn’t planning on buying one for his operation.

“The reality is that the planter isn’t the be-all and end-all answer to every issue,” he said. “Yup, it improved certain things and made achieving consistency easier. But what we really saw was that environment is critical.

“The more things you can get right at planting — the No. 1 factor being good residue management — the better the odds that you can get away with reduced seeding rates. It’s a package concept — the better the seedbed you put it into, the better those seeds are going to do, regardless of how you get them in the ground.”

[furrowtickler]

There is a lot of huge $600,000 plus drills everywhere that used for exclusively canola
Your thread is bunk ...

[furrowtickler]

And yes they work very well

One interesting note after doing yield tests for over 20 years , my neighbour has an ole "shitty" Bourgault 8800 drill, piece of junk ..... hmmmm , always in the top three .... hmmmmmm
Out of 75 plus guys . Must be the shitty Bourgault I guess

[furrowtickler]

And the other 74 , are running everything you can imagine in between .
Never a perfect drill .
It's the wizard not the wand