Planting Finesse: Farmer explores technology aimed at uniform seed placement
Written by Jonathan Eisenthal
The quest is simple to state and exquisitely hard to achieve: how can a farmer plant every single corn seed in a field in exactly the same way? The end goal being to raise a crop that emerges, grows and matures as a uniform set of plants. Such a field would deliver a true maximum yield.
Mark Enninga, a Fulda, Minnesota-area farmer, has investigated a host of methods in pursuit of minimizing inputs and maximizing yield, including strip-till, wide-row corn and cover crops. This year, he looked at one of the emerging trends in planting: equipping the planter with a hydraulic frame weight-distribution system meant to improve uniform seed placement and decrease compaction from heavy-central fill planters. While equipment manufacturers are starting to add weight-distribution systems to new planters, very little data on yield effects has been published.
With the help of a Minnesota Corn Innovation Grant, Enninga purchased an after-market hydraulic frame weight-distribution system. This past spring, using an implement that plants up to 24 rows of corn, Enninga planted 12 half-mile-long strips of corn. In each pair, one strip was planted using the weight-distribution system. The other was planted without it.
The weight-distribution system has two brackets, one on each side of the planter, hydraulic cylinders and a manifold that uses the cylinders to transfer weight from the center bar to the outside bars, Enninga said.
“I started the season with an emergence evaluation on 24 rows…and flagged those plants every day for four days, and tallied up the results,” he said. “As we neared harvest, we evaluated the best row, the worst row, and a couple of others. … The purpose was to document if there was a missing plant, or a gap, or plants close together. Plants that emerged late, plants that emerged early — what was the impact to the individual plant yield?”
Enninga is still assessing the data from this year’s harvest and plans to shortly file a complete report. He wants to share with other Minnesota farmers the incredible value he feels the Innovation Grant Program offers.
He also said he hopes his project might encourage others to try out a hydraulic frame weight-distribution system or propose their own Innovation Grant.
The Innovation Grant not only helped Enninga purchase the equipment. It also helped him draw together a technical support team. Bob Recker, owner of Cedar Valley Innovation LLC, and Enninga’s wife, Elizabeth Enninga, a research scientist at Mayo Clinic, helped Enninga design the replicated and randomized plot. Cheryl Heard, district conservationist at the Slayton office of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, offered technical advice in how to integrate the experiment into Enninga’s use of strip till.
“As a farmer, you can get very busy with the day-to-day activities of running your farm,” Enninga said. “But you have ideas of what you would like to try. It’s helpful to partner with collaborators who regularly work with research to help you organize, and to assist with plot design and analysis.”
To learn more about Enninga’s project, or to apply for your own Innovation Grant, visit mncorn.org/research.
