BRANDON – Some soil, seed and fertilizer combinations favour mid- row banding and others don’t.
And dragging extra mid-row hardware around when it isn’t needed may seem inefficient and potentially damaging to yields because of unnecessary tillage.
Farmers could quickly solve this dilemma by lifting or lowering those mid- row openers.
That’s the premise behind the new mid-row banding option on the Twin Disc No Till Drill manufactured by Amity Technology in Fargo, N.D.
“You can take your regular Twin Disc No Till machine and convert it into a mid- row machine very quickly,” Eugene Breker told producers attending the Manitoba Zero Till Workshop in Brandon this winter.
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“It takes about 20 minutes to install each mid-row bander. There are just four bolts to attach each one to the arm. When you don’t want those extra openers in the ground, you use the drill’s hydraulics to lift them up out of the way. It’s all very simple.”
To lift the units, a producer puts a block or a board under each tool and lowers the drill frame so the springs are compressed. A cam on each tool is rotated to lock the mid-row unit in place. Returning the implement to the normal configuration is done by releasing the cam.
Breker said companies use different definitions for the term mid-row banding.
“Some manufacturers put their mid-row nitrogen between the wide rows, but that causes extra soil disturbance in a strip (of soil) that should go untouched,” he said.
“In our view, the mid-row nitrogen should go between the two narrow rows because that’s the soil strip that’s already disturbed. Our mid-row system drops down right between the two six-inch paired rows, so the (remaining) nine inch strip remains undisturbed. The (fertilizer) band runs three inches off the side of each seed row and one to 1.5 inches deeper than the seed.”
Breker said phosphorus and other granular and starter fertilizer goes down with the seed, while nitrogen goes down through the mid-row bander. The arrangement works particularly well with anhydrous, he added. “The soil closes over the ammonia immediately and the packer seals it up immediately. We get virtually no loss of ammonia.”
The packer tire is the same as that used on the Concord drills. It has a thick, heavy sidewall, and tire pressures are six to eight pounds per sq. inch.
“The stiff sidewall gives us good firm packing on the sides. The centre of the tire is where we get the flex, so that’s a softer pack. We’ve found that you need a really strong sidewall on a no till packing wheel. There can be so much residue off to the sides that you’ll puncture your tires, especially in corn. The radials we ran years ago had thin sidewalls. They were really nasty for punctures.”
Amity manufactures a number of air drills and seeders, but Breker thinks the new Twin Disc will be its No. 1 priority.
The engineers designed the drill to handle corn and small grains and it can be fitted with tools for different situations, including strip tillage and mid-row banding options.
Retail price for the mid row banding option is $1,200 US per seed run.
For more information, contact Breker at 701-232-2161 or visit www.amitytech.com.
