Open Station

Luke from Iowa posted on Crop Talk about quitting planting before 10 o'clock at night. He plants with an "open station" tractor like I always did.

"Open station"

came about after the first cabs on tractors became popular 20 years ago or so. Before that, they were all, just "tractors!"

When I was a kid, dad planted corn with a 2 row mounted planter on a Ford 8N, then quickly switched to an Oliver 550 because we wore out the Ford too quickly. He planted like that with the Oliver 2 row mounted planter for most of my years on the farm. About the time I left, he got an Oliver 540 4 row pull type planter and then we rented the White 5100 notill corn planter in 1976 and that changed planting for us forever.

I gave up planting with that old planter for my 60th birthday and sold it to an AgTalker. He just called this morning to tell me a story. He got radishes and peas planted in 10 acres of wheat stubble last summer and then got 7000 gallons of hog manure on it per acre. You can imagine how rough it was but the radishes really soaked up the hog manure and left the ground mellow.

Jim said he planted a plot for Pioneer on it and the rep drove in, scratched his head and asked, "are you really going to plant into this?" I can imagine what it looked like, not quite as bad as those Missouri River flooding landscape pictures from last spring but you get the idea. He answered, "sure am!"

He said when they got done, the rep said that was the nicest job he had ever seen a planter do and the ground was as mellow as could be. That made me pretty proud I hadn't sold a piece of junk, although it really needs a paint job, and the old White planter lives on.

I don't think I could have pulled it with a cab tractor because I like to be as close to the planter as I can and hear all that's going on with the mechanisms and the sound of the seed to soil contact.

On that note, there are problems as expected with last year's seed from certain areas, so keep your bags and check your fields weekly. Also, I had a farmer call me and he tested the 28% UAN he bought locally and it only tested 13%. What's worse, an unidentified chemical in the fertilizer nearly killed his corn.

Farmers, test your seed and your fertilizer, unfortunately there is some junk out there!

Ed