Planting pictures from this spring in the IL swamps

Thought I'd share a few pictures form this spring. Kind of an odd spring for us, we were able to pretty much work all the through with only a few rain delays.

First picture is looking forward out over the hood and into the tabletop flat swap ground of NC IL. This land was not farmed until the 40's or so. The soil still contains fossils of the small snails and suck that used to live in the swamp.



The drainage ditches in the background were dug with a floating dredge and clay tile was laid to drain this ground. In all reality my family has struggled to farm it up until 1994 when the clay tile was finally done away with and new tile was placed every 90 feet.






This is where I spend alot of time in the spring. Day takes the day shift and then when he goes home to milk I take the night shift and we can keep the planting running for about 20 hours a day.


This display is the main brains on the entire setup. It steer the tractor, monitors the seed, and shuts off different sections of the planter in odd spots of the field to save seed. I work as a field tech for this company so that is why we use them instead of Deere's GreeStar, plus it is more accurate.


Over here from top to bottom we have: SmartBox for insecticide control, the original Kinze planter monitor as a backup, and the control box for the planter to fold it. The air gauge is to keep an eye on the air system that operates the seed clutches.


With this system we generally do not use markers.....



......except in very odd ares of the field such as here where I have a little finger to plant.


Last picture is nothing special, just a shot out the back. This land does best with moldboard plowing but as equipment advances someday we will no-till pretty much everything. Currently we have been no-tilling for around 12 years on other ground and it has been working good.


Feel free to ask any questions at all.

Thanks

One last one or what works in front of me. This farm is custom farmed and they only want us to work it once right before it was planted, that's why the field is so green.

WOW!

Do you no-till with that same planter on other fields. How much does that planter weigh and is that size tractor the minimum needed to pull the planter. What is the row of 12 switches or plugs below the trimble display screen for. Some were up and some were down. Looks pretty challenging to know what all that tech stuff is for.

Awesome pics!

Looks a tad more complicatesd than my 494A 4 rw and Oliver 77 that I used in the early 70's.

:>)

Thanks everyone for the positive comments!

(quoted from post at 19:40:41 06/17/12) Do you no-till with that same planter on other fields. How much does that planter weigh and is that size tractor the minimum needed to pull the planter. What is the row of 12 switches or plugs below the trimble display screen for. Some were up and some were down. Looks pretty challenging to know what all that tech stuff is for.

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sourgum, in the past we have no-tilled with this planter on other fields with pretty good results. It would work even better if it had residue managers or coulters to clear a strip so the soil could warm up a little faster. I will have to look in the manual to find the planter weight. I used to know it right off the top of my head. I do know though that when in transport mode it exerts 7700 lbs. directly onto the hitch of the tractor so a special drawbar is required. The minimum tractor size needed to pull this plater would be around 200 HP and something with front wheel assist. In the past we have pulled it with a John Deere 4850 MFWA and it did OK, it crawled up alot of hills. This 9220 is rated at 325 and at times it gets a good workout but it never slows down at all. The switchbox below the display is to turn the sections on and off manually if you want to. I have never found a reason to do this but I'm sure someday I will. The switchbox has 12 switches and the planter has 8 sections so that is why some of the switches are off. It's like anything else, there is a learning curve but it's not bad once you get the hang of it.

(quoted from post at 10:06:22 06/18/12) Looks a tad more complicatesd than my 494A 4 rw and Oliver 77 that I used in the early 70's.

:&gt

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Larry, one thing with your planter is that you could drop in a pin and go! A neighbor and I were discussing this spring about all the time we spend getting stuff going on the first day.

WOW! Thanks for sharing. A bit different than our 55 acre hobby farm in South Carolina where we us a 75 HP tractor and it's practically overkill with a 2 row planter and New Idea corn picker.