Ideas to improve drill penetration in dry ground

In dry regions of the Prairies in 2009, some drills had trouble penetrating into moisture. Many openers just skidded along the surface in some places. Ron Settler of Lucky Lake, Sask., wrote the following article for Grainews, which will appear in an upcoming issue. I'd like to include some of your ideas along with the article. So if you have advice on how to improve drill penetration in dry soils, please send me an email or comment on this blog site.

Here is Ron's article. Read it for inspiration:

We were sitting in the shade at an auction eating pie on a hot June day last spring. The auctioneer was selling something that none of us were interested in, so pie and coffee took the centre stage. The conversation turned to seeding and how well various types of seeding implements worked. A farmer from the next town said that out west in the Kindersley area it was so dry last spring that some air drills couldn’t penetrate the hard dry soil. They just scuffled over the hard spots and left the seed too close to the top.

We were lucky enough in our area to have some moisture to soften up things a bit before the seeding process, but I know how those in the drier areas farmers felt. Back in the ‘80s when it was deadly dry in our area we were seeding with a Cockshutt 225 discer pulled behind the John Deere R. As per usual, I had the oldest equipment in the area. Both the discer and the tractor were made in the ‘50s.

The crop insurance man, a nice older gentleman from a nearby town, came out to look at the poor germination and pointed out part of the problem. He had had discers like this one many years back. When it was dry, they were a bit on the light side and didn’t have enough weight to penetrate down to the moisture, he said. Sure enough, you could tell exactly on which round we filled the seeder box. The germination was better when the drill was heavy with a full seed box, then germination got poorer and poorer as the seed box emptied. I can’t remember the yield that year, but it wasn’t much. In ‘88 our best field of wheat on summerfallow went eight or nine bushels to the acre. Something to do with lack of rain.

So how do you seed your crop and how well does it penetrate when it’s dry? I’m definitely not an expert on newer seeding apparatus. Most of them are big, fold up and costs more money than I have to spend — that’s my total knowledge of newer seeding implements. But the auction sale conversation got me thinking about the subject.

We finally parked the old discers and now have a set of Versatile 2200 hoe drills. These are pretty heavy units, weighing 17,000 pounds for 35 feet, plus you can put in 105 bushels of seed and fertilizer. That adds up to around 23,000 pounds fully loaded, or about 650 pounds per foot full and 480 pounds empty. Once you get that weight on the hoes, it’s pretty hard for them not to go into the ground. But I’ve even seem them skid over a real hard spot.

Someone told me you can tell a good seeding implement in a dry year. He said anything will do a good job in a year with the right amount of moisture, but it takes a dry year to tell if it’s doing the job properly. With air drills that won’t go in the dry ground, what could you do to help the penetration? 

—Could you change the points on the unit for better penetration?

—How does speed affect the penetration? 

—Does working on an angle help?

I know if it’s dry and hard, you could work it up ahead of the drill, but if it’s too dry it might just blow away, too. Plus, most of us have gone away from a bunch of field work before you seed, so we haven’t budgeted the time for the job in our busy spring schedules. 

I hope it’s not dry this coming year, but if it is, hopefully this article has got you thinking about what you could do if you have trouble getting those little seeds down to the moisture. It would be really nice if you could share those constructive thoughts with the readers. There’s lots of knowledge out there and we’re all in this fun game of farming together. If you’ve got some ideas — let’s hear them. Send the editor an email.