Blurring the lines between planter and seed drill

Is it a planter or a drill? If a concept machine created by Horsch eventually comes to the market, someone might have to invent a new category.

“We’re trying to mix and trying to get the best of both worlds, which is a seed drill and a corn planter,” says Laurent Letzler, who manages Horsch Canada and attended Agritechnica in Germany.

The Solus 1047 SX was on display at the Horsch booth and many people looked closely at its unique design.

The goal is to provide the quality of singulation to small seeded crops that is currently possible with corn and soybeans, plant them with the same precision, while maintaining the centre fill tank and the high speed, high volume planting possible with a drill.

“We are at a point where we have good placement with our seed drills, but we can go further,” says Letzler.

That includes dropping seed into the trench created by the double discs and double gauge wheels common with planters.

A challenge of getting planter equipment into a drill is having enough space to maintain narrow row widths required for canola or wheat. The Solus solves that by staggering the longer row units to get to either a nine or 10 inch spacing.

“Because with a 10 inch spacing, imagine the potential. You do your cereals on 10, do your beans on 20 and your corn on 30. So it could be a one machine fits all,” says Letzler.

The row unit on the Solus XS looks more like a corn planter than a seeder.

A bank of tires runs across the front of the planter row units. The tires help carry the weight of the heavier row units, but also provide some smoothing of the seed bed in front of the row units.

“We also realize that the uniformity of the seeding depends a lot of the uniformity of the seed bed.”

Horsch officials point out that the unit is currently a concept, but it seeded 1,000 hectares of winter wheat this fall.

Self-propelled sprayer updates

Horsch has updated its Leeb sprayer, which is the company’s most popular product in Canada.

The sprayer with the front cab has more horsepower in its VL model and is now available in an 8.7 litre engine with either 460 or 400 h.p. The company is also selling a new Leeb VT model with adjustable track widths and 5,000 and 6,000 litre capacity.

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