Canola’s tendency to lose its protective coating doesn’t make it an easy seed to work with.
The tiny seeds becomes susceptible to a myriad of soil borne diseases and insects when the coating flakes off, often driving the germination rate down into the 50 percent bracket.
Losing half their seeds to flaking is a major financial headache for farmers when seed costs $10 a pound. As well, that flaky coating can plug metering discs when farmers use a planter.
Some companies concentrate on new ways to make protective coating adhere to the seed, while others focus on ways to handle the seed more gently.
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Spurred on by research at Ohio State University, some manufacturers now offer poly cupped flighting in their augers.
“We sell many different kinds of seed carts and we have poly cup augers on all of them as standard equipment,” said Glen Parrett of HitchDoc in Jackson, Minnesota.
HitchDoc began selling its Travis seed carts in Western Canada this winter. It stopped selling conventional auger and rubber belts five years ago.
“We don’t even sell conveyor systems anymore,” he said. “Would we sell a rubber conveyor to a farmer just to fill a perceived need? No. We don’t do business that way. The poly cups are definitely a superior product.”
Parrett said the cupped flighting is a solid poly material rather than steel with a synthetic outer layer. However, while the material’s softness factor helps cushion delicate products such as canola seed, he thinks the shape of the cup is more important.
“I think it’s mainly the shape. You gently hold the seed in that cup and carry it up the auger instead of forcing it with hard steel. The seed sort of rests in the cup,” he said.
“We lean pretty heavily on (OSU researcher Randall) Reeder’s tests at Ohio State. Farmers see the data and they put two and two together. They pretty quickly realize the dollar impact of having more of their seed germinate.”
Iowa company Lundell Plastics developed plastic cupped flighting when it began building poly cupped flighting to move livestock manure. It still makes manure augers, but flighting for lifting seeds has become its main market.
“We sell flighting to about 20 different OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and they use it in various applications for seed moving equipment,” said Matt Roeder, product engineer at Lundel.
However, Roeder said poly cupped flighting hasn’t found its way into western Canada until recently. His closest OEM customers are Market Farm Equipment in Ontario and HitchDoc in Minnesota.
He said Lundell builds the flighting in only a handful of different sizes. It’s up to his customers to insert it in their tube of choice, thus determining the clearance between the flighting’s outside diameter and the tube’s inside diameter.
“If you want tight clearances for canola or other small seeds, the most popular flighting is five inches in diameter. For soybeans, that goes into a six-inch tube, leaving about 3/8 inch clearance,” he said. “For small seeds, it’s a matter of using a slightly smaller ID tube or else buy our flighting that’s 5 5/8 inches in diameter and put it in a six inch ID tube.”
Roeder said Lundell Plastics sells a lot of poly cupped flighting to farmers who retro-fit existing augers.
In Western Canada, poly cupped auger flighting is now available as standard equipment on Amity Sunflower sold by Agco and Travis seed carts distributed by Todd Botterill.
For more information, contact Glen Parrett at 507-847-4049 or www.hitchdoc.com, Matt Roeder at 877-367-7659 or www.lundellplastics.com and Todd Botterill at 204-871-5004 or www.botterillsales.com.
