Good morning Jim!

I can talk most informed about my own personal fight this year w/ sidewall compaction, although every single seed company sales rep/agronomist that I've talked to has said that it was a pretty consistant issue w/in their respective territories - regardless of planter set-ups.

As you're well aware, my planter, this year, as most years anymore, was set up more by individual combinations on individual rows than as a whole = still experimenting for that 'perfect' planter after all these years. Half the planter (8 rows) were still set up by what I still find to be the best system for me, 'here'. Two rows of the planter had your closing wheels, one of them having the bolt on side plate on one side. Other rows had other combinations that varied even through the spring.

Where my sidewall issues were the absolute worst, the biggest correlation was to the anhydrous/strip bar!! I have no idea why, now, but I had two rows in one field that followed my 8 row bar clear across most of that field. My assumption is that the two rows involved (side by side rows) had mole knives that were worn more than others & didn't  break up the soil as well. I run my bar as deep as possible & do go through a lot of knives, so that may explain why the pattern didn't continue. I do remember changing some knives because I thought they'd lost their aggressivness 'somehere'. Also changed a lot for breakage = Lesson learned; stick with the gen-u-wine B-88 Mole knife.

Beyond that, planting date & weather after planting seemed to be the next correlating factor. the ground in the planting period most affected really worked well, but we had some cold & heavy rain afterwards. As you describe, the planter slots did open back up some, in some soil types & the compaction issue began to become obvious at that point. Closing wheel type didn't seem to matter a lot. In fact, I'd have to say your wheels were somewhat worse, especially at the slots opening back up. The martin wheels did a better job of working the sidewall in & had less opening back up of the slot to a minor degree. One thing is sure, neither closing wheel type did anything to correct whatever the problem was w/ the strip bar. As things worked out, both closing wheel types would have gone over those rows, at some point. Nothing else did much of anything else on the planter to make things better or worse.

Ironically, a creek bottom field that I lost patience with, waiting for it to dry, was the least affected by sidewall compaction that I have. I mean, I finally pulled out of this thing, that day, as I was actually afraid I was going to get stuck! Where I finally drove out of it, with the planter lifted, I left ruts from the planter wheels that were well over a foot deep - they're still there...