For Monty Shivak, it was the kind of problem that could make a guy swear.
“A mile of field left to seed, just 44 feet wide, when he’s got a 60 to 80 foot seeder, doubling up on all that seed and fertilizer.”
Pat Beaujot thought so, too.
As it turned out, the president of Seed Hawk in Langbank, Sask., was in a position to do something about it.
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He started with technology from Shivak’s company, Raven Industries Canada of Stockholm, Sask., which shuts down field sprayer nozzles when they overlap areas already sprayed.
Beaujot then applied the technology so that it can stop the flow of fertilizer and seed and lift shanks from the field as they reach areas already planted.
Using Raven’s Accuboom, Seed Hawk was able to remove as few as five shanks from the ground if overlapping was imminent.
Until now, farmers have used global positioning systems and automated steering to reduce wasted spray, seed and fertilizer. What’s new, Beaujot said, is automatically starting and stopping the flow and tillage in small portions of the seed drill.
Other equipment has been able to manually shut off larger runs of up to one-third or one-half of a machine, but Beaujot wanted to go further.
“We thought, half? Why not one-eighth at a time?”
Seed Hawk developed individual electronic-over-hydraulic-gate controls for each of eight runs and an equivalent electronic valve cutoff for liquid products.
The system performs this task automatically as the unit approaches land that has already been seeded.
Seed Hawk has always based its drill design on individual, active hydraulic cylinder control over each shank in the seed drill.
With its new system, which it calls section control technology, odd shaped fields can be more easily planted without overlapping product and tillage.
Beaujot said by preventing overlap, producers avoid crop lodging caused by overproduction and delayed crop maturity in field headlands where overlapping is usually difficult to avoid, especially with larger machines.
“Not only do you avoid lodging but save money on the wasted product, create evenness in the crop at harvest, but you reduce your environmental footprint created by overapplying fertilizer.”
Tim Ottenbreit of Raven said the marriage of Raven based Envizio Pro mapping and Accuboom machine control equipment is in its second year of testing, and most of the bugs have been worked out.
“Getting the appropriate look-ahead and delay times for shutting down liquid and granular products has taken some effort. Higher rates of products need longer look-ahead times. Liquid stops nearly immediately. Granular has to finish flowing out of the seed or fertilizer tubes,” Ottenbreit said.
“Now you just have to drive when you reach the headlands. No buttons to push, no hydraulics to reach for. The computer does it for you.”
Ottenbreit said that means the computer has to perform three separate jobs: one for shanks, one for seed and one for fertilizer.
“For the producer this is invisible. Set and forget,” he said.
Beaujot said one concern was whether the seeding tool would skew from side to side when the shanks were removed from the soil. He also worried that airflow changes caused by cutting off or opening seed runs would cause problems within the delivery tubes and distributors.
“Didn’t happen,” he said.
New Seed Hawk air tanks will be ready to accept the optional SCT system in September.
Brian Dean of Seed Hawk said the SCT option “won’t be cheap” but felt that for producers planting 2,000 acres or more, the savings in seed and fertilizer would pay for the system in a few seasons.
Beaujot said the company will sell a limited number of the units for next year with full production starting in 2010.
