World’s largest | Company finds that smaller drills with larger carts can improve efficiency under less than ideal conditions
Seed Hawk’s new air seeder cart is one big machine.
Empty, it weighs more than many tractors. Loaded, it passes the legal weight of a highway tractor and trailer.
But if it ran over your foot, it would put only 10 pounds per square inch onto your toe.
The Langbank, Sask., company has named the world’s largest air seeder cart the 1300, which also happens to be the number of bushels of product it can hold.
“You can pull up to this cart and unload your semi for 20 minutes. When it’s empty, you will still have room for six more tonnes in the cart,” said Brian Dean of Seed Hawk.
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It didn’t start out as a new seeder cart project. Rather, it began life as 100 foot seed drill.
The company already had an 84 foot drill, which can be appealing for farmers looking for efficiency.
However, large drills can sometimes become inefficient.
The wetter conditions of the past several seasons have stopped growers from seeding most of their fields from fence line to fence line in long, straight passes. Even satellite guidance and seeding section cutoffs can’t adjust for all the wet spots and ditch runs.
As a result, while bigger can be better, drills in the 60 foot range remain more popular in many cases.
“We were looking at efficiency models using different cart and drill sizes,” Dean said.
“In perfect climates, bigger drills are the answer … and we found that cart fill times were really important and in practical applications bigger was much better.”
Seed Hawk compared three theoretical models up to a 980 bushel cart feeding a 120 foot drill and found that to a point, smaller drills with larger carts were more efficient.
“A 100 foot bar can seed 60 acres an hour. But fill times will get you and if conditions aren’t ideal … well we found that there is a lot more efficiency in the cart than we thought,” he said.
While Seed Hawk isn’t shelving the bigger seed bar, it took a back seat to a new cart.
The company’s biggest cart had previously been 800 bu., but last November engineers in its research and development department began planning for something really big.
They had to establish what would be a reasonable limit for length because when paired with a big drill and a 500 to 600 horsepower tractor, the machine still had to get in and out of fields and farmyards.
A pair of existing cart frames were welded together and testing began to see if a 55 foot long cart would fit into tight field approaches near the company’s headquarters.
“It worked pretty well, better than we guessed,” Dean said.
A large portion of Seed Hawk’s sales, especially with its biggest drills, are to Australia, Russia and other Soviet republics, which meant the 1300 cart needed to fit into an ocean-going container and meet road width and height restrictions once it arrived at its international destination.
The 1300 is 52 feet and three inches long when out of the box and ready to work. It is 14 feet and three inches wide and 15 feet and three inches tall. Empty, it weighs 34,393 pounds.
The tanks are all separate units, which means that load cells and a scale act as an as-applied rate monitoring device, which lets the operator clutch at the headlands, wait for the load to stop moving and get an accurate read on the amount of product being applied per acre and make any adjustments to rates based on that data.
Pulling the unit through the field isn’t for the weak of horsepower. On the flat, the big granular product machine tipped the strain gauge on the hitch at 150 h.p. Pulling it uphill topped 200 h.p.
“That’s for the cart by itself,” said Dean.
With the drill, it would need another 3.5 to four h.p. per opener, or 300 to 375 h.p. for an 84 foot toolbar.
“Typically this will be pulled with a 500 to 600 h.p. tractor,” said Dean.
When loaded, the 1300 tips the scales at more than 116,000 lb.
That made tires out of the question because of the risk of soil compaction and the need for six sets, four as duals.
Tires on large carts typically put 17 to 30 pounds per sq. inch onto the soil. The 1300 puts down 10 p.s.i.
Seed Hawk chose an American-made track from Camoplast of Sherbrooke, Que. The company’s Flexhaul tracks were an off-the-shelf solution that fit the cart’s needs.
Seed Hawk installed 100,000 lb. model 100 units on the back and 40 series 40,000 lb. tracks on the front, mounted below a fifth-wheel type steering swivel.
The 36 inch wide rear tracks cover nearly 7,100 sq. inches of soil, while the 25 inch belted front tracks covered 2,300 sq. inches.
“We were worried there might be berming of soil in tight headland turns. Even when we back up the (outer-most, inside tire) of the drill (in a turn), we might get a two inch ridge. Again it was better than expected,” said Dean.
The prototype drill cart was pulled by a CaseIH 535 Quadtrac to seed 2,400 acres this spring on a 60 foot drill, which Seed Hawk uses for research. With the beta testing over, the company is confident that the big unit will go into production.
The 1300 will make its public debut at the Western Canada Farm Progress Show in Regina June 20-22.
