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Furrow creation begins at harvest - Agri News

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PONTIAC, Ill. — Planting is the furthest thing from our minds as crops push toward maturity and summer turns to fall.

However, furrow creation starts at harvest.

Matt Grove, Precision Planting’s northwest region manager, and Trevor McKown, Precision Planting’s South Dakota region manager, discussed the importance of furrow creation and planter maintenance at a recent Precision Technology Institute field day.

“We start to develop the seedbed for the next growing season at harvest. It starts with residue management,” Grove said. “As we get bigger combine heads or smaller heads are we spreading residue too far and having too much overlap? Are we under-applying residue? What that’s going to do is lead us into different variation in the field.”

Uniform emergence next spring is the goal.

Planters that correctly lift and fracture the sidewall, remove air pockets and place the seeds where there is moisture, oxygen and the right temperature set the stage for that uniform emergence.

Furrows

Beyond those principles needed for emergence, Grove noted also key objectives necessary for furrow creation. Here is what he said:

Clearing residue: “Part of that is going to effect depth. We’re probably not going to get the depth if there’s excess trash in the field. It’s going to create hairpinning and that’s going to be in competition for nutrients and moisture and even create potential disease pressure.”

Width: “We have to get the seed to the bottom of the trench and the depth of where the seed is going to align. I might have a really tight V furrow, but in reality the seed is not in the bottom of the trench.”

Furrow integrity: “Are we crumbling on top of ourselves? Are we getting too much soil displaced to the point of not being able to pull the closing back in?”

Compaction: “Compaction leads to closure. Are we forcing that soil so tight that we can’t get our closing systems to pull it back in? We need to be able to look at that compaction, understand how we’re managing soil density and what firming force we need.”

Maintenance

It is important to understand each individual row unit and that begins with maintenance. The furrow creation errors that Grove and McKown have seen on farms could have easily been corrected through maintenance.

“The first place we start on the maintenance side, the parallel arms need to be as close to level as possible,” Grove said.

“Once the bar is level, check the bushings over and over. It doesn’t matter what you do for downforce, if there’s wear in there it has to overcome that. When we talk about the value of an ear, an extra ear is about seven bushels. So, those depth variations of a quarter of an inch are huge.

“Once that maintenance is done and we shift back to the gauge wheels and the openers, don’t forget your maintenance up front in the row cleaners and fertilizer coulters. When we think of furrow creation and furrow integrity, it can be disturbed up front. If the coulters drop below the depth that I want to plant, I’ve now broken that soil before I had a chance to open it. So, now we have to overcome the fact that we’ve already loosened soil density and manage that.

“When we look at maintenance, make sure the coulters are tight and make certain your stops are set at one-eighth to a quarter inch higher than what your planting depth is going to be.”

McKown added that it’s important to understand that using finger-style or blade-style row cleaners depend on the field’s environment.

“If I’m in a conventional tilled situation and I want to move nothing but residue and not disturb the soil, I want to use a rake. I’ve seen it many times where guys that are running conventional tillage are going to the bigger, wider teeth that are too aggressive,” McKown said.

“The goal is to only move away the residue and leave the soil undisturbed, so understanding what row cleaner model we have, what style we have with the environment we’re going into.

“If we’re in no-till, we see more of the wider sharp-tooth style that’s going to cut and move the residue. Setting them correctly and having the right equipment is important to make sure we’re setting us up for success for the furrow.”

Fine-Tune

Grove and McKown went on to provide the following planter maintenance recommendations:

Gauge wheels: Gauge wheel shimming is important. It’s based on ground conditions and the rolling resistance that there is to keep the disk clean but still have motion in the field. Ultimately, the goal is to get it tight enough so it can be kept clean and keep that beveled edge rolling.

Disk openers: The goal is to form a true V for the seed to land in the bottom of the furrow. The diameter of a new double disk is 15 inches. It needs to be replaced when it gets down to 14.5 inches. The bevel on most 3 millimeter disks is about five-eighths of an inch. There are some after-market companies selling three millimeter disks that have a narrow bevel where they go down to seven-sixteenths. Make sure if doing maintenance at home or with a dealer that you know what you’re putting back on there. Once we know that, we get into our shimmy, our washers behind the pinch-point. With a standard John Deere disk of three millimeters, 1.5 to 2.5 inch of contact point is recommended. We see inconsistent depth over and over again every year and it goes back to shimming.

“We talk maintenance at length and virtually at every clinic, every meeting we do. It’s probably the majority of what I talk about with most growers. It’s because no matter what we do from a technology standpoint, maintenance will always beat it,” McKown said.

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