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Holly Hill, SC | The suredrive is electric motors running each meter at each row and has its advantages. Our fields are far from square so the accurate boundaries generate perfect headlands which gives us perfect swath control and no overlapped seeding. When harvesting corn on the end rows we no longer have the overlapping row which can cause plugging of the row units especially in the mornings with damp corn plants. Cotton seed is $650 a bag (6.2 acres per bag) so seed saving help. Also I plant 18 rows (20 row planter) for my end rows which match with my 6 row corn headers and 6 row cotton picker. Also we variable rate our population in sandy soil, dryland and irrigated using population prescriptions. The electric motors are much smoothing and consistent from the old chain drive system. The monitor was already purchased to run Intellislope on my Soilmax tile plow. So that is a $5k multiple use product. The monitor and other modules provide me a precision singulation monitor which can display major or minor problems with my metering that can add up to real money over many acres. I installed the system myself so I did save that money. Only major disappointment with it is it will not perform row by row population changes. This effects me when I am trying to create 0 population prescriptions through diagonal roads across the middle of fields. (Precision Planting vDrive does)
The Striptill has advantages and disadvantages.
Advantage: When dry conditions the shank brings moist soil up from below and provides perfect soft seed bed. Residual herbicides work great when applied right on top of this freshly tilled area. No problem getting opener disks in the soil (no downforce needed). Destratifies the nutrient layers and incorporates pervious lime applications. Breaks up any hard pan.
Disadvantages: Heavy, needs HP. Limited width. More things to maintain as does any tillage machine. | |
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Planting Corn in South Carolina (video)
