Since he brought Peacock Precision Seeders to the market 15 years ago, Neil Wagner of Hague, Sask., has sold 12,000 of his openers that convert a conventional air seeder into a one-pass seeding machine.
Those Peacocks will be hard at work this month, even the oldest machines. Wagner’s inspiration for the Precision Seeder did not come from modern development in seeding technology. “It’s all based on the old double disc drills from 50 and 75 years ago,” he said.
“You’d hear them going eeeky-eeeky, eeeky-eeeky, eeky-eeky as each opener bobbed up and down to find the bottom of the seedbed. That was the rods squeaking as the disks bounced through the worked summerfallow, searching for the packed ground to drop the seed. That’s exactly the same thing we do today with the Peacock seed shoe. We place the seed on a firm, undisturbed seedbed.”
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Wagner said his evolution from farmer to manufacturer was a natural progression. “Back in the early 1980s, I was busy trying to expand my farm Ñ more acres with less equipment Ñ because that’s what farmers do. I loved the idea of single-pass seeding. Maybe it’s because I’m lazy, but it made sense to me to go out there once and lay in the fertilizer, drop in the seed and do all your packing in one pass. You run along at three mph (five km-h) one time instead of five or six mph (eight or 10) three times, so it has to save you time and money.”
Moisture conservation was another goal.
Wagner said in the early 1980s he studied the idea of buying an authentic air drill to help him move into full zero till. After some tire kicking, he decided the only two differences between a new drill and his own air seeder were the number of tires and the number of dollars. He said the price of a dedicated zero-till air drill in the early 1980s was often five to 10 times more than an equal-sized air seeder.
“There was probably a $100,000 difference between a new zero-till air drill and my old cultivator air seeder. The drill supposedly had better packing, but I’ve come to think packing is less of an issue than we have been taught to believe,” Wagner said.
“If you do not disturb the soil in the area immediately beneath where you place the seed, then packing is not such a big deal. You only need that big packing capacity if you have high disturbance openers and you mess up the seedbed. My thinking is to disturb the seedbed as little as possible.”
He said some air drills in the early 1980s were eight metres front to back, a rigid distance that he felt would force some openers to gouge too deep while others would drop seeds on the surface. The more he looked, the more the independent, double-disk drills made sense.
“My John Deere 665 air seeder already had adequate metering for fertilizer and adequate metering and monitoring for seed. But it was tied to a 41 foot John Deere 1610 chisel plow without a floating hitch. Depth control was terrible, really terrible. And the system forced us to make multiple passes over the field harrowing and packing.”
Wagner decided to stick with his 665 and figure out if he could get precise seed placement with the old 1610 frame. He started building experimental opener systems that he called “on-row seed depth control.”
It took almost a decade to develop a design that performed in the dirt well enough to sell at a farm show. Hundreds of hours were spent with the hired man sitting in the comfort of the air conditioned tractor cab while Wagner rode on the cultivator frame observing openers.
“I’d come home totally caked with mud and dust. My wife would ask me if we were back in the days of tractors without cabs. But we did figure out how openers work in the field,” he said.
“You won’t learn anything about seeding if you won’t ride on the seeder. You get to watch the openers as they go over a slightly compacted area Ñ where a truck had driven or where the combine drove last fall Ñ or a soft spot where they drop down slightly. They keep dancing up and down, trying to find the solid seedbed.”
Wagner’s motivation through the 1980s was to ensure that each opener easily followed the firm contour and placed the seed on the best seedbed. The more the openers danced, the better they worked.
The result is the Peacock Precision Seeder. Each opener assembly has a narrow, off-the-shelf fertilizer knife up front. It pushes aside crop residue and slices a 90-degree V-trench for the fertilizer, usually 21Ú2 to five centimetres deeper than the seed shoe, depending on how the operator adjusts it.
Fertilizer is dropped into a slot that is one to two cm wide at the bottom, depending on which knife is installed. The trench’s sides run upward at a 45-degree angle, meeting the inner edge of the solid seed shelf.
The fertilizer opener not only brushes aside residue and drops the full shot of nutrients for the season, it also loosens the soil for the seed shoe that follows about 40 cm behind.
The two leading horizontal edges of this back-swept seed shoe knife cut two fresh shelves of undisturbed soil at the top of the fertilizer trench. Because the leading knife didn’t disturb the soil on this shelf, the seed comes to rest on firm rather than loose soil. As a result, Wagner said packing is not as critical as with higher disturbance drills.
The two extremities of the swept knife are 15 cm apart, left tip to right tip. The two seed bands fall onto the two shelves about 15 cm apart. Each seed band ranges from one to 21Ú2 cm wide.
The system produces 15 cm of disturbed soil and a 10 cm centre space between seed rows where the fertilizer is placed deeper than the seed, resulting in five to eight cm of separation between seed and fertilizer. “It’s no problem putting anhydrous down the knife at seeding time,” Wagner said.
“You’ll see good, even germination because all your seeds are placed on firm, moist soil.”
Paired rubber packers then come 36 cm behind the shoe to seal the seed rows.
The seed shoes are cast rather than fabricated. The alloy has a 25 percent chrome content and the shoes cost $32.50 each.
“Seed shoes wear out. There’s no getting around that. The guy who seeds at six mph (10 km-h) breaks more stuff. If you seed at 31Ú2 mph (51Ú2 km-h), there’s no problem,” he said.
“Our experience is that chrome shoes last 21Ú2 times longer than conventional cultivator shovels. If you put new shovels on every thousand acres, you’ll be replacing these chrome seed shoes at about 2,500 acres.”
Although customers can install any fertilizer knife they want, Wagner said he recommends a carbide tip. “Use Gen or Atom Jet or anything else, as long as it has the carbide tip. We’ve found that you can recover the extra cost in fuel savings alone in the first 500 acres.”
The paired packer wheels run a 180 to 200 kilogram trip. This doesn’t make the old cultivator frame into an air drill, but the packers can lift the cultivator off the ground. There are no hydraulics in the opener system.
“If we have one problem, it’s twine in the field,” he said.
“The wheels are 13 inch diameter, so they seem to want to pick up twine more than the 25 or 30 inch wheels you normally see on a packer. If twine goes unnoticed, it wraps up and takes out the seal, and the next thing you know it takes out the bearing. It’s not a major problem. “Every time you stop to fill, you just take a walk behind the openers with your utility knife and cut off any twine you see.”
When he was still actively farming, Wagner experimented with row spacing to see what worked best on his own farm. He would try as many as three spacings at one time, ranging from 12 to 24 inches.
“I think 24 inch spacing gives you a pretty ugly looking field, but I’ve got some customers in the really dry, arid regions who use 24 inch on cereals when soil moisture is at a minimum and they want the absolute least amount of disturbance,” he said.
“I’ve found that 15 inch row spacing seems to be about right for most situations. Probably 75 percent of our customers are now on 15 inch spacing. It gives you excellent trash clearance and reduces your power and fuel requirements. On a 40 foot machine, you’re only dragging around 32 openers.”
Improved weed control is another bonus with 15 inch spacing. Wagner said the wider space between rows lets farmers study the weed situation better and thus make better decisions about spraying.
Although the seeder assembly costs $475, Wagner said reducing the number of openers on any type of seeder or drill will reduce investment, maintenance and fuel costs.
He said he has retrofitted the Peacock assemblies to every make and model of heavy-duty cultivator frame sold on the Prairies in recent memory.