Two service calls to malfunctioning planters 30-plus years ago remind me of how far pre-season preparation and maintenance has come:
A part-time farmer couldn’t figure out why three out of six rows on his planter weren’t dropping seeds in their furrows. When I arrived, I could see tire tracks leading directly from where the planter had been parked all winter in the farmstead’s windbreak to where it waited for me 100 yards down the endrows. I could see footprints where he had paused to fill it with seed after he pulled it from the windbreak.
After a brief inspection, my diagnosis was that the seed tubes on the problematic rows were clogged with dead morning glory vines. Never mind the corroded drive chains, rusty finger meters and other issues I pointed out to him.
Once I got the planter so it was putting seeds in the ground at least every foot or so, he was happy and sent me on my way before, “the bill gets too high.”
Another Planter Down
I was working on another farmer’s seed monitor while he prepped the planter in his farmyard. I noticed that part of his preparation was to remove the door over the finger assembly of each seed meter and then tap the meter’s housing against the planter frame to dislodge a mass of rotted roots and shoots that covered each finger assembly. He hadn’t emptied the seed meters after he finished planting the previous spring, and the seeds had sprouted and filled each seed meter with a tangled mass of roots and shoots.
When I asked if he wanted me to disassemble the seed meters and polish up the backing plates and finger assemblies, he assured me that, “Naw, they’ll be fine. The finger-things polish up real good after you run a bag or two of seed through them.”
Fortunately, the definition of, “Ready to go to the field” has dramatically improved for planters in the past few decades.
