Farmers who want to seed the maximum acres per hour might consider a twin drill rig from Australia.
It seeds 80 acres per hour and, depending on seeding rates and fertilizer strategy, runs 18 hours without refilling.
Aerial photographs and You-tube images circulating on the internet demonstrate the capacity of the super-sized twin drills at work in Australia.
Many of these drills come from Janke Australia, a company specializing in precision seeding equipment.
Here’s the math based on the company’s suggested speed of 5.5 mph.
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Travelling at 5.5 mph, a 120-foot-wide drill covers 3,484,800 sq. feet per hour. There are 43,560 sq. feet in an acre so the twinned 60-foot Janke drill covers 80 acres per hour.
The company began building twinned 40-foot drills two decades ago, according to Janke’s David Brown. It recently began selling twin 60-foot units, which cover 120 feet per pass.
Its largest single unit drill is an 80-foot-wide machine. It has not officially twinned it into a 160-foot drill.
Brown said the basic twin drill hitch is not complicated, so it’s not unreasonable to expand it to pull a pair of 80-foot units.
“It’s not really an engineering problem by any means. We’ve probably overengineered them all along because we weren’t too sure how they’d work at first.”
What about turning the thing?
Brown said Aussie farmers don’t think too much about turns. They’re accustomed to running three miles before it’s time to use the steering wheel.
“We have runs longer than three miles straight, so turning isn’t a big issue for us.”
There’s another big difference between Canadian and Australian seeding strategies. We make frequent stops for fertilizer and seed. They don’t.
“Here on the northwest slopes of New South Wales, fertilizer goes in the ground first, before the seed. We use little or no seed-placed fertilizer, so our carts carry seed only.
“On the twin drills, we have two carts that each carry 12,000 litres (340 bushels) of seed, so we normally run 18 hours before we need a seed fill.
“Our seeding rates are very low compared to yours in Canada. We know we will not get enough rain to justify high rates of fertilizer or seed.”
Janke also offers a banding option for producers who want to put down fertilizer with the seed, he added.
He said the regular hydraulics on any large tractor are adequate to run the systems on both 60-foot drills. Pulling in the typically dry soil is not a problem either.
“On our 120-foot twinned drill, the large Challengers pull it easily as long as you’re at a moderate speed.
“We make precision planters, so we don’t want a lot of ground speed. Five or 5.5 mph is optimum. You throw up too much dry dirt if you try to go any faster.
“We have competitors who claim their drills can seed at 15 mph. But we prefer to focus on precision. Put the seed exactly where you want it in the soil. You cannot do that at 15 mph.”
Brown said fields with tram tracks are smoother than a normal no-till field, but even tram tracks can generate a lot of bounce in the machine and openers.
“The other thing people don’t like to talk about is safety. What if something breaks at 15 mph or the seed cart hitch comes off? You can have a catastrophic event if that happens.”
Brown said two main factors are driving the trend to twin drills. He said the workforce in the farm regions of Australia is diminishing. It’s difficult to find people to run machinery.
“We pretty well always seed 24 hours a day, round the clock, non-stop, on 12 hour shifts.
“So if I link two 60-foot drills together, I eliminate one tractor and two drivers. That remaining Challenger is certainly not going to use twice the fuel as two Challengers.
“Another consideration is that the market is somewhat limited for second hand 80-foot drills. It’s easier to sell two smaller drills in the 40- to 60-foot range than it is to sell one second hand 80-foot drill.”
From a Canadian perspective, two moderately sized drills linked together might make sense. It would allow a producer to pair them for large, wide-open cereal and canola fields.
The drills can then be separated to seed smaller or awkward-shaped fields dictated by the terrain, or smaller fields of specialty crops.
Brown said the ability to quickly separate the drills is important. Most farms in his region are a single continuous tract of land but moving from field to field can still pose problems.
“Sometimes we do have to break them up so we move two individual drills. That is a factor with twin drills.
“We design the hitch so we can take them apart and put them together quickly. Each drill has its own cart, so when they’re apart, they can be used as individual independent drills.”
Prairie farmers are often attached to their favorite mid-sized, Saskatchewan built drills and have strong brand and design loyalty. These are engineered for prairie conditions and are all good at placing seed and fertilizer rapidly and properly.
Prairie built Seed Hawk, Seed Master, Conservapak/Deere, Morris, Bourgault, Flexi-Coil/CNH, Ezee On and Harmon are considered among the best seeding implements in the world.
But bumping up a step or two, or up to the super-sized drills, isn’t financially feasible for everyone, even if it makes agronomic sense.
So consider this hypothetical situation: You are happy with your prairie-made 44-foot drill, but you need a bigger drill because your acreage is expanding.
What if you found a good deal on a twin sister to that favorite drill, available because somebody else moved up to a bigger single drill?
Does that mean you need another seeding tractor plus another operator to pull that second drill? Or does that mean you might consider twinning the two 44-foot drills into one big 88-foot drill?
If you farm in the northern parkland region, a single 44-foot drill might be optimum. But, twinning might be an option if you farm with wide-open fields or in the flat land regions of many parts of the Prairies.
Canadian history illustrates a number of twinned and tripled farm implements. Multiple hitches have been built for multiple disks and swathers over the years.
Linnco produced a multiple swather to take advantage of economics and agronomy of the 1970s. Case and others teamed seed drills with multiple hitches going back to the time of steam.
Could it happen here? Dave Brown of Janke Australia thinks it might.
For further details, e-mail Brown at info@janke.com.au or visit www.janke.com.au.
