by Joe Brunker, Monroe, WI 

Planting started in Southern Wisconsin two weeks ago with above average temperatures followed by a week of below normal temperatures and even some snow flurries last week! This past week has been very good planting conditions and a lot of corn has went into the ground. We have some customers finishing with corn and more could be done by this weekend if the rain holds off.

The ExactEmerge planters have all been running well. Most customers have been running 7-10 mph across the field. Seventy acres per hour in our larger fields with a 24 row planter has been pretty common. Setting swath control has been pretty quick since you can dig seed like a sandhill crane when the spacing is so close to perfect. We did notice that some hub torques got a little loose after the initial break in. Similar to the ProMax 40 disks, it seems that a tighter hub torque has been better than a loose hub torque. Round seed has also singulated a little better than flat seed 98-100% vs 97-98% on average. With the brush belt carrying the seed to the trench and with it being speed compensated, the in ground spacing has been very good on both types of seed.

JD 8370R & 1775 ExactEmerge

Active Implement Guidance with ProTrakker hydraulic hitches have also been working very well this spring doing strip till in some rolling ground of Southwestern and South Central Wisconsin. Our local RTK bases have been performing very well again this year. If you are interested in RTK, give us a call and we can line up a demo before you’re done planting.

JD 9410R Pulling JD 2510H Using Active Implement Guidance

I got a call yesterday about soybeans overplanting 5-6%. We ended up finding the seed very small and multiples getting stuck in some holes on the disk. We reduced the vacuum as much as we could and then cut back on the prescription rates using the Prescription Multiplier in order to get the correct amount of seed in the ground. It sounds like there many some abnormally small beans out there this year, so keep that in mind.

Small Bean Seed Overplanting 5-6%

I’ve received a few calls this week from guys running adaptive curves in our small and irregular shaped fields. When the customer leaves his first line to go plant on the other side of the field, the line will not let him engage autotrac when he returns. Backdating to 14-1 GS3 software has fixed the problem on all of them so far.

Adaptive Curves Not Working

Last but not least, I’ve had a lot of calls this week in regards to planter clutches. It’s impossible to dig too much seed when you start planting. In many cases, set-up has been incomplete and measurements were missing causing gaps on one end of the field and extra overlap on the other end. If you are running the new 15-1 GS3 software, I would recommend that you go in and uncheck the Implement Detection box, so there’s no way that it can get changed on its own once you take your measurements (Menu, Display, Diagnostics, Multiple Displays, Change Settings, uncheck the Auto Implement Detection checkbox and hit the save button). If you are still planting, it would probably be a good idea to dig some seed coming into and then again coming out of the headlands to make sure there are no surprise when the corn comes up. If you like what you see, make sure that you record all of your tractor measurements, planter measurements and on/off times so you have them for next year.

Sectional Control Info

Sloan Support is written by the product support team at Sloan Implement, a 19 location John Deere dealer in Illinois and Wisconsin.   Learn more at www.sloans.com