Seeding

This weekend Wanda and I went to Ken’s farm. He has a field that has been sprayed with roundup and worked a few times. We worked it again with the disks, then Ken seeded it with a Valimar, then we worked it with the harrows and a cultivator. After that Ken packed it with a packer, it was impressive.

The Valimar is like an air seeder body without a cultivator (shown above). The seed is put onto the center part, where it is measured by a set of rotating rollers that are driven by a tire. As you drive the tire turns chains that turn a shaft that drives a transmission (different gears for different seed rates) that drives the rollers. The seed falls down from the rollers into a set of tubes, then it is blown down the tubes and out the booms on the sides. I think there are 24 tubes in all that are equally placed across the back. The white hose in the picture supplied air to the tubes from a PTO driven blower. The whole set up works pretty good, and seeding was done fast. This unit only puts the seed on the top of the soil, so we had to harrow it to get the seed covered.