converting planter and drill to no till

One of the interesting things I'm reading about is no till planting corn into a killed crop like rye, or hairy vetch.

My planter is an old JD 494A and my drill is an even older McCormick MF. In the drill manual, it mentions "stubbling in", which seems to indicate you could use it for limited no till. It talks about increasing the down pressure, which of course make sense. I don't think the planter manual discusses no till at all.

What are the reasonable possibilites here to do a little bit of no till planting/drilling by modifying these pieces of equipment with cheap off-the-shelf components or junkyard scrap? My ground is very light (almost sand in some places). I'm only looking at doing a few acres at a time.

Any ideas?

Corn is fussy. It doesn't like to be crowded - need even spacing. It likes to all be the same depth, & grow at the same time. 'Here' anyhow the ground is real cold yet, you want the soil to warm up too. You get it placed uneven in the ground, and you have a poorer yield.

Notill for corn is a different thing. It will depend on what type of soil, and what crop trash you are planting into. You can spend $2000 per row easy to get a good system that works under many different conditions. Yetter, Dawn, Hiniker, Martin, and many others make several different styles of gismos to attach to different planters to make this work. Dependsif you need to scrap off old cornroots, fluff wet clay, etc.

In cold climates, heavy clay, lot of snow & rain like I have - notill doesn't work very well. Strip till is being tried a lot.

--->Paul

Let me see if I can understand how this 7000 works....

The single coulter in front cuts the trash. It's mounted to the small about 2X2 front toolbar and can be adjusted up/down to suit. It looks like there's a combination coulter scraper (cleaner) and liquid injector also attached there. Then there's a star disked thing that pushes the trash aside. Are there two of these on each assembly, pushing trash in opposite directions? The big wheel directly behind the star wheel(s) - what does it do? Is it a closer wheel? Is there a double disc arrangement inboard of the wheel to make the seed opening? I understand the chain thing, but always wondered just how much they really add.

I appreciate your sharing what you tried with your old planter. I'm still thinking.....

Is there any reason a no till drill can't be used on tilled ground?

My slicing and fertilizer coulters I borrowed from my AC 2000 monobeam plow. I added the square tubes on their sides to hold the thin ammonia knives on the rear. I didn't mount them consistently because I planned to pull the bolts on the coulter pivots and put in longer bolts with the bracket under the bolt heads but half of them didn't come apart nicely and drilling out a 3" long bolt wasn't all that profitable. So I made some fat long nuts as spacers and mounted some of the bars backwards as being easier than cutting the brackets off and rewelding them since welding is not one of my skills and it was getting time to plant. I don't have a scraper on the front coulters but the ammonia knives did sometimes collect weeds between them and the edge of the coulter. These ammonia knifes are only 3/8" thick.

There's a pair of star wheels, called trash whippers by Dawn Engineering. These are made specifically to fit the 7000 with no drilling, model 1140-1 or 1140-2. I don't see any made to fit the 494 in the catalog I downloaded last year. They clean off the straw in front of the planting unit, and knock clods out of the way so the gauge wheels don't bounce up and down which also helps get a uniform planting depth. Just inside the big gauge wheels (a pair of them which act as disk scrapers) there are two opener disks with the seed tube between them. The opener disks run tight against each other on the lower front side. Then the tail piece with the closing wheels and the drag chain.

There have been 7000 planters made for no till, sometimes called conservation planters. They typically had a wide ripple coulter mounted where I have trash wheels and stronger down pressure springs, otherwise as far as I can tell they had no other differences. The wide ripple coulter was expected to do a little bit of tillage but it proved to make a mess more often than help. In true no till conditions where the field has been no tilled for a few years no tillage is necessary, and just makes for a hard spot, the very opposite of the no till ideal.

A no till drill should work fine in tilled soil, just it might have to be held back to keep it from planting too deep.

If there's loose dirt and the closers don't quite close the seed trench, there's a chance the chains will push in some loose dirt. All I can say is that I got a nice picket fence stand of corn this year and I hope to have crop to brag about, since the rains have been timely, but there's a couple more months of thunderstorms and strong winds to stand before harvest to say nothing of possibly high heat too.

Gerald J.

Gerald>Link J.

A no till planter needs a coulter out front, not for tillage (the "no till" wide ripple coulter only works in dry soil anyway, makes a disaster in wet dirt) but to cut the straw so the trash whippers can spread that cover away from the planting zone and then the planter opener has to open the trench, drop seed in it, and close the trench.

I suspect the 494 is not a disk opener but a shoe and that is going to limit it to tilled ground.

The picture is my 7000 planter after no tilling this spring. I also put down 32% N with the cutting coulters so they probably went a bit deeper than just needed for just cutting the straw. I was planting in bean straw.

The chains on the back help cover the seed, so its said. They've been on this planter since it was bought new in 1974.

Deere planters are in at least their 4th generation since the 494.

No till gets easier after a few years when the soil finally stays mellow from frost action and no tillage, but initially its tough.

An alternative might be strip till where a group of coulters stir up a strip 5 or 6" wide and then the planter is run in the same strip either immediately or weeks later.

I tried a no till scheme with my old cyclo 400 planter one year. Without spraying it was very bad but the initial stand of the corn was good. I mounted clipped 6" cultivator shovels on their shanks on the front of the planter, one for each row. I didn't make the mounts strong enough so I lost some. They did have a tendency to act like a dump rake piling up stalks, but where they worked up a little seed bed the corn and beans came up nicely, just three weeks of rain preventing cutivating out the rest of the weeds that took over the fields. The corn wasn't worth combining and the beans did only 20 bushels but that year I expected a drought ahead of planting. That single cultivator shovel down 3 or 4" in front of each planter row may work, so long as you get with the spraying to kill off the weeds and cover crop.

Gerald J.