| Using Common Drills, Fertilizer Spreaders, and Carriers to Plant Difficult Seeds |
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Introduction (page 1 of 9)
Common drills are the usual tool for planting clean, hard, relatively heavy,
free-flowing seeds such as wheat, rye, soybeans, alfalfa, and cowpeas. Many
people refer to this equipment as simply wheat drills.
Difficult seeds are the fluffy, bulky, chaffy, awned, rough-husked ones that are relatively light and flow out of a common grain drill poorly, if at all. They include seed of Old World bluestems (such as plains and caucasian), native range grasses (such as big bluestem, little bluestem, indiangrass, and switchgrass), crabgrass, rescuegrass, and—to a lesser extent—ryegrass, fescue, bromegrass, orchardgrass, and wheatgrass. In this publication, they are referred to as bulky seed.
The equipment industry has specially engineered drills and other planters that distribute and plant bulky seeds. They often are too expensive to be purchased by many producers and are not readily obtainable in some regions, but they sometimes can be rented from various organizations such as the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) and farmers' cooperative store support services. These drills are more common in the western range country of the United States.
These special drills seldom have a fertilizer box or liquid fertilizer attachment, which is unfortunate because much of the soil in Oklahoma and the southeastern United States is phosphorus deficient. Grasses get a boost from receiving a banded nitrogen-phosphorus or complete fertilizer like 18-46-0 or 19-19-19 down the row with the seed at planting. Drills and other planters that can accommodate fertilizer are an asset in early stand development and good early production, as are certain common drills that are managed correctly.
This information targets primarily the small to medium unit operated by managers who want to do their own planting. Without special equipment, we are relegated to adapting what we have or what is available, usually common drills or broadcast techniques. We will focus primarily on common drills and certain fertilizer spreaders and summarize years of experience with seeding techniques.
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