BRANDON – The common assumption is that seeding more acres per hour means buying a bigger drill.
But what about a moderately sized drill that seeds at 15 mph?
That’s the concept Australian entrepreneur Noel Tobin started with years ago when he began developing the Bullet for his Tobin Disc Drill company in New South Wales.
He named it the Bullet because it’s designed to perform one-pass seed and fertilizer placement at speeds up to 15 mph.
There’s nothing new about a single disc drill followed by a closing wheel and press wheel, but Tobin said his arrangement of those components has broken new ground.
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He said the seeder’s speed capabilities can cut seeding time in half, while a reduced draft should cut fuel consumption.
The first Tobin Bullet to arrive in Canada belongs to the Vandaele family at Medora, Man., which is testing the drill to make sure it’s right for the Prairies.
The family likes what it has seen so far, considering how muddy it’s been this year.
“We seeded 600 acres of peas into cereal stubble at over 11 mph this spring. And it was wet,” Bob Vandaele said.
“We seeded on the full mile instead of the half mile. There were virtually no sloughs and no drainage ditches. It was wide open. The logic behind this drill is you get it out on those wide open fields, a full block section with nothing to slow you down. That’s when you really go.
“But it also has some benefits on those fields with lots of turning. The smaller sized drill gives you more room to manoeuvre and trim up in the corners.”
Vandaele said at speeds higher than 11 mph in wet conditions this spring, the Bullet caused less soil disturbance than their hoe drill at 5.5 mph.
His observation was made on a field where the first half was seeded with the Australian coulter machine and the other half with the family’s hoe drill three days later when the soil had a chance to dry more.
“That was the driest field we could get into at the time, but it was still too tacky for any kind of drill. We really shouldn’t have been in there with any kind of drill, but that’s the way it goes.”
He said they hadn’t intended to make the soil disturbance comparison, but they thought the excess weight of the Tobin might create a problem in their other fields, all of which were even muddier. Consequently, they switched over to the hoe drill.
Changing drills mid-stream gave them the opportunity to directly compare the drills on the same field.
Not only did the Tobin coulter drill cause less soil disturbance than the other drill, but Vandaele found it also seeded 39 percent more acres per hour.
Vandaele said when he visited New South Wales last year, he realized that Australian farmers can seed at 15 mph by strictly following a tramline system, something Canadian farmers may be reluctant to consider.
“Their equipment follows the same tramline tire tracks over and over every year, so it’s easy to pull the drill at 15 mph. The tram tracks become very hard-packed.”
Vandaele also used the Bullet to seed wheat into a section of sunflower stubble this spring, which he described as a difficult task.
“It’s always a nightmare. You can use an air hoe drill, parallel link coulter drill. They all have trouble in sunflower stalks. The Bullet wasn’t perfect, and the sunflower stalks caused us some trouble, that’s true, but this was better than anything we’ve tried in the past in sunflower stubble.”
Vandaele thinks the basic Bullet engineering has a lot to do with the performance they’ve seen on a limited number of acres. He said the positioning of the solid rubber closing wheel and the pneumatic 13 inch packing tire seem right from what they’ve seen so far.
“We tried seeding with and without the closing wheels. It looked pretty good without the closing wheels. It only takes about a half-hour to put the closing wheels down, so we tried it and applied a bit of pressure and we saw an amazing difference. We have to manually raise or lower the closing wheels, but once that’s done we can adjust the depth and packing pressure from the tractor cab.”
Although the Vandaele family has now tested the Bullet drill and invested a lot of time into the project, Vandaele doesn’t pretend it’s the ultimate answer.
“To be honest, I don’t think there’s such a thing as one drill for all conditions on all farms. If a guy can afford it, he should really have a disc drill and a hoe drill. This year, it was so wet here during early stages of seeding, that I can’t honestly give the Bullet a fair assessment. This isn’t the right year for us to be comparing any seeding equipment. I feel that in a normal dry year, like we typically get down here, we’d be going at 11 mph with this Bullet drill. But we won’t know until next year.”
More testing needed
Vandaele said it’s too early to judge the Bullet, considering most drills get at least two or three years of testing before they are sold to farmers.
“It’s not fair to put the drill out on 1,000 or 1,500 acres of poor, wet slop and get any realistic idea of how it really performs. So right now, we can make no guarantee of how it will perform on all soils and conditions. But the crop we did seed with it emerged nicely and the field finish was impressive. We are working together with Noel Tobin to make some slight changes and adapt the drill to Canadian conditions.”
He said the heavy drill did get stuck in heavy mud, a problem that Tobin is now working to rectify by installing tires with better floatation.
Vandaele will have his 44 foot Tobin Bullet at the Western Canada Farm Progress Show in Regina June 17-19.
For more information, contact Bob Vandaele at 204-665-2384 or visit www.tobindiscdrills.com.au.
