BUTCHER’S HOOK: Onlookers at the Lowbank Agriculture Bureau’s seeding trial.WITH increasing interest in disc and hydraulic-tyned seeders, members of the Lowbank, Mallee, branch of the Agricultural Bureau of South Australia conducted a seeding demonstration this season using four tyned and five disc seeders to see how they compared.
Many members have recently bought new seeders or adapted existing machines, so the demonstration were an opportunity to look at some of the issues including soil disturbance, hairpinning, and disease and plant agronomy.
Mace wheat was sown with the same seeding rate and fertiliser rate across the paddock, but seeding depth and speed was left to the operator and done as it was on-farm.
The paddock had been EM-mapped and each run was GPS-aligned.
Disc seeders used in the trial were Tobin Bullit Disc, Case Concord Discamate, Ezee On Disc, John Deere Disc, K-Hart/Yetter Coulter.
Tyned machines included Case Concord/Anderson Openers, Bourgault Knife Point, Morris Contour Hydraulic Tine, and Seed Hawk Hydraulic Tine.
The Seed Hawk twin-tyne machine had strong emergence in May and held the strongest emergence figures up to August 16.
Interestingly, the Seed Hawk was a strong performer compared to tyne and disc machines.
In reviewing the performance of disc machines, the John Deere disc appeared to have had the strongest result from May to August in terms of emergence uniformity across the flat/mid-slopes, pulling-in a similar comparative scoring result to the Bourgault knife point on the flat and the Morris on the mid-slope.
All disc machines had little emergence on the sandy rises in May.
As such, the disc seeders showed the biggest increases in plant numbers, particularly on the flats, followed by the sandhills and the mid-slopes.
*Full report in Stock Journal, October 18 issue, 2012.
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