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NW Washington | Well if you talk to someone like Kevin Anderson or Micheal Horsch they will tell say you can seed any thing with a hoe opener and that disc openers and sidewall compaction will reduce your yield. I am sure you will find others that will argue the other side of that point. One thing for sure is that hoe openers move a lot more soil and leave more bare soil than a disc opener. Most current hoe openers don't have good seed depth control for each opener, so depth setting is kinda slingshot accuracy. Some newer designs and the especially the double shank hoe have a depth wheel/packer for each opener. Long residue is hard to get through a hoe drill, but they don't hairpin or tuck residue into the seed slot. Usual rule of thumb for hoe drills in cereal crops is that the stubble has to be shorter than the row spacing of the drill and you need a good straw chopper on the combine. No-till disc drills work better in longer stubble with less residue on the ground. For maintenance the nod here goes in favor of the hoe with a lot fewer moving and rotating parts than disc openers. Many hoe openers are designed to produce a wide banded seed row and the double-shoot openers can apply both seed and fertilizer at the same time. I reckon that hoes probably take more horsepower to pull than most disc drill too. So each has advantages and disadvantages. Disc drills are popular in the North America, but in not too many other places in the world. Here is a link to Horsch-Anderson whose operation in the US is in South Dakota. http://www.horschanderson.com | |
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Air Seeders - Hoes vs. Discs
