Is it a planter or a drill? If a concept machine created by Horsch eventually comes to the market, someone might have to invent a new category.
“We’re trying to mix and trying to get the best of both worlds, which is a seed drill and a corn planter,” says Laurent Letzler, who manages Horsch Canada, and was at Agritechnica in Germany.
The Solus 1047 SX was on display at the Horsch booth and had a lot of people looking closely and some unique design points.
The goal is to provide the quality of singulation to small seeded crops that is currently possible with corn and soybeans, plant them with the same precision, while maintaining the centre fill tank and the high speed, high volume planting possible with a drill.
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“We are at a point where we have good placement with our seed drills, but we can go further,” says Letzler.
That includes dropping the seed into the trench created by the double discs and double gauge wheels common with planters.
One of the challenges of getting the planter equipment into a drill is enough space to maintain narrow row widths required for plants like canola or wheat. The Solus solves that by staggering the longer row units to get to either a nine or 10 inch spacing.
“Because with a 10 inch spacing, imagine the potential. You do your cereals on 10, do your beans on 20 and your corn on 30. So it could be a one machine fits all,” says Letzler.
Another unique feature is the bank of tires running all across the front of the planter row units. The tires help carry the weight of the heavier row units, but also provide some smoothing of the seed bed in front of the row units.
“We also realize that the uniformity of the seeding depends a lot of the uniformity of the seed bed.”
Horsch officials are quick to point out that the unit is currently a concept, but that it seeded 1000 ha of winter wheat this fall.
Self-propelled sprayer updates
Horsch has made some updates to its Leeb sprayer that is the company’s most popular product in Canada.
The well-balanced sprayer with the front cab gets more horsepower for its VL model and it is now available in an 8.7 litre engine with either 460 or 400 hp. The company is also now selling a new Leeb VT model, with adjustable track widths and 5,000 and 6,000 litre capacity.
