Dutch Agriculture’s Ultra High Separation opener knife has a wider fertilizer-to-seed spread that reduces toxicity risks
With drier growing conditions over many parts of the Prairies in the last couple of seasons, some growers applying high rates of fertilizer have been experiencing incidents of toxicity with seed. That has led some to look for different opener knives for their air drills that provide more seed-to-fertilizer separation.
“We had customers come to us and ask if we had anything with more separation on the Seed Hawk (drills) because they were seeing some seed burn with the factory setup,” says Connor Bohachewski, territory manager for Dutch Agriculture.
“The last two or three years have been on the drier end of growing seasons. With that there’s been a risk of seed burn and fertilizer toxicity.”
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The result of that customer feedback led to the development of the Ultra High Separation (UHS) opener knife designed to fit Vaderstad’s Seed Hawk air drills.
“At Dutch, we pride ourselves on listening to our customers and what they want … what they’re asking us for, and that’s exactly where that came from,” Bohachewski says.
The UHS knife maintains the same three-quarters of an inch vertical separation, but it adds an additional inch of horizontal distance, increasing the horizontal space between the seed and fertilizer to two and a half inches from the stock distance of one and a half inches.
The UHS design has been undergoing field trials for the past two seasons on a number of different drills. Bohachewski says the results have been very good.
“Everything has worked really well. We’ve been getting the separation we want without any more soil movement than any other type of knife. We haven’t run into any mud plugging issues yet. It’s been a really good success story for us.
“We haven’t seen more draught or a slower seeding speed. We haven’t seen any issues with trash flow. If anything, it’s actually been a little bit better.”
The new openers were released to the market in October, and the company expects to have roughly 30 sets available for the next growing season.
In addition to the UHS, Dutch Agriculture is also introducing the Razor Series knives, which fit several drill makes and models and allow for different vertical seed-to-fertilizer separations.
“It’s a design that we knew was going to interact with the soil well,” says Bohachewski.
“This project has been going on for a couple of years already. At the top end of the opener, where it fits to the drill, we made it fit a bunch of different models.”
The company has also added new heavy duty knives to its product line designed for SeedMaster, John Deere P600 and Bourgault drills. They use bolted connections to make replacement easier.
Bohachewski says the new designs have been subjected to extensive field trials to make sure they are capable of good performance in all soil types.
“This year we prototyped with about 25 different producers, so it’s not like we’re just trying them with one guy. We’re getting different guys in different areas to try stuff for us to make sure it’s going to work everywhere. We want to put this stuff through the ringer off the start and make sure it’s good to release to everybody.”
