Can I plant corn with a drill??

I have a Melroe 201 drill. I believe 7.5" spacing... Thanks to someone else on this board I found how to get the seed wheels... My thought was to get the coarse wheels, Plant with row 1, cover up holes 2,3,4 plant with row 5, etc...

This gives me 30" spacing and I woulnd't need to purchase a planter... Any thoughts on if this would work?

Jeff

I've put up a lot of sileage; used to average about 90 acres a year; sometimes sugar corn and sometimes heavy on the grain end. The rounds usually come in 110K kernels per bag.

I personally think it would be way eaiser to just go buy the feed for the cows. 2 acres is gonna slide thru old bossie in very short order, in my opinion.

Have a good one,

Allan

This just a ain't a gonna work. Not even a little bit.

First off, let me say that I know absolutely nothing about your drill and I know nothing of your operation.

But, corn is nothing more than a breed of grass that we humans have developed, breed and molded for our own use.

Being a grass family member it is going to act like a grass if you try to "sow" it. It doesn't compete very well with other grasses and it especially does not compete very well with itself unless it has room to spread out and grow.

If the kernels are not spaced correctly, you are going to have some pretty 30" rows of green, short, scrawny corn shafts resembling Kane; with not an ear of corn in sight.

Things you must consider are the kernel spacing, kernel depth, soil compaction around that seed and an undamaged seed with access to moisture to swell the seed and begin the growing process.

One bag of seed is going to plant roughly 2 1/2 acres (based on an 80K seed count). How we gonna split that one bag of seed up in the drill hopper and route out to the 4 seed tubes (still don't know about the construction of your drill)?

Now after my yammering on about that, there are folks who have used your method to plant soybeans by plugging up every other drop tube and have had some pretty good luck. But, beans are a legume crop and legumes don't mind a crowded neighborhood; fact is, they will try to out do one another up to a certain point.

Corn planters seem pretty simple to us, but actually, they are quite an exacting machine.

As always Joe, this is just my own personal opinion and is expressed as such.

Allan

You'd be better off with a planter of some type. The 494 is ok but you gotta mess with the plates. I'd get a 1240 plateless or 7000 for less than 250 bucks on a farm auction. Four row units go for little of nothing whereas the two row units tend to go for a pile of money, amazingly enough. I've been moderately tempted to buy a couple of these planters, cut them in two, and sell each half for twice what I paid for the whole unit ;-) Another advantage is the fact that you can band in some starter fertilizer with a planter.

If you try drilling corn, let us know how it works.

--->Paul