A farmer explains how a modern corn planter works

[Music] we're gonna play a chord are you ready hey there thanks for turning down my road if this is your first time here my name is Carl my little brother and I both work for local farmers full time but we both also farm together with our cattle herd and our hay operation everybody's involved from the smallest to the biggest if you don't have the joy of farming yourself I'd love to help you experience it through this channel whatever your background you found the right place this is Dodge Brothers farm and ranch [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] okay so here's a really quick rundown of how this works there's a lot of seed up in those big yellow tanks you saw some putting it in there's a big blower on the back and it blows the seed through these hoses and then out to the individual row units there's the big blower on the back of the planter that blows the air to move the seed from the big seed tanks out to the little mini hoppers on each row if you look inside here there's a little bit of seed in there so this hose is the hose that brings the seed into the mini hopper and then this hose is actually a vacuum hose now behind this door I can't open it up right now because all the seed will fall out but behind this door there's a rotating seed this with holes all the way around the outside of it spaced out properly to pick up and drop seed so the vacuum hose is sucking air through this side of the dish so the air is coming through those holes on the seed disc as its rotating and it picks up a seed out of the mini hopper takes it up and over and then drops it down into the seed - so as you're going along the disc openers open a furrow in the ground the gauge wheels keep the depth consistent with the disc ochres the seed is dropped off the plate goes down the C tube now there's the bottom of C tube right there so the seed traps out into the furrow the seed firmer he slides over the top of the seed and makes sure that its press firmly into the ground and then the closing wheels come along and close the furrow okay so we just start the two vacuum motors first then we flip these two switches up to auto load the meters then all the meters will turn just enough to load up with seed until the seed tube sensor senses that it's dropped a few seeds through the seat tube and they're all loaded up and you're ready to play okay I've already got the hybrid set right here I need to go over here and set our population we want to plant 35,000 seeds per acre turn the master plant switch on and there's our 35,000 and we'll get going well everything seems to be working pretty good one important thing to do though is to get out and dig up some seeds and make sure that it's actually doing what it says it's doing I want to check the seed depth and check the spacing a little bit and make sure that we're doing a good job of closing up the furrow so when we get down to the end I'll get out and we'll do a little digging and see what it's doing grab my handy little digging tool here and I'll put you up on my hat and we'll go check it out all right sometimes it's a little tricky to find some seeds but we'll do the best we can [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] there's one right there see him there's another one right there [Applause] he was right there okay [Applause] spacing is really good look at that that's nice that's really good okay so now let's sneak up on a few more seeds and check the depth we want to be right about two inches maybe slightly deeper but not much I don't want to be past two and a quarter [Applause] there he is right there that seed is 2 inches exactly and I like to sneak up on him from behind like this to make sure that there's no air pockets around the scene or any pockets of dry dirt that looks really good [Music] [Music] so I'm planting along minding my own business everything's going great and then all of a sudden we lose sirens alarms and I look down at the screen on the 20/20 not planting on row two not planting on row four I check to make sure that I still had the vacuum motors going make sure that I didn't accidentally bump one of the hydraulic levers and shut the blower off or shut the vacuums off and everything was going so then I looked down at my field view on the iPad and there's another row showing up the suddenly not planting it looked exactly like what happens when you run out of corn and I knew that couldn't be the case because I'm just getting started in this field we just loaded the planter up so I got off to check to see if there was seed in the mini hoppers on the roads that we're not planting there was not and it quickly became obvious what was wrong let me go show you this is almost kind of funny it's so obvious what's wrong when you get around the back side of the planter here so this big blower right here whenever the planter is down and you have the hydraulic down pressure engaged this blower is running forcing air through the ductwork and into that ductwork to blow seed out to the many hoppers but look at this the duct came disconnected so this was flopping around like one of those crazy inflatable salesmen guys in front of the car dealerships just flopping its arm like crazy blowing air everywhere and as you can see their seed waiting to get pushed out to the mini hoppers so I'm guessing every one of these by now is probably empty dump that one's got some in it row two is one of the ones that was not planting yep no seed in there okay that was a super easy repair I put the hose back on there tighten the clamp on now watch this this is really cool this is one of the things I love the most about this precision planting system with individual electric motors on each row so that they can shut off themselves watch this I'm just gonna turn around and get back on my GPS line get headed back the other direction in the way that I was going then after I get turned around here I'm gonna set the planter down a little ways before the problem occurred and since it knows where seeds have been dropped and where seeds have not been dropped it'll just automatically fill in the problem all right I'm locked onto the guidance line and you can just watch this happen right on the screen and just go ahead and set the planter down right now watch this this is awesome it's only running those two rows right now and then boom the rest of the planter starts up and you will never be able to tell later on in the year that we had a problem there with the planter guys look what just happened that little car just stopped in the field and dropped off this I'm pretty happy about that let me give you a quick rundown of all these screens that are in the cab right now this is the John Deere display it's a forty six forty model this is the same screen that I had mounted on the gator last week when I was driving around mapping the waterways and the borders around the edges of the field and all we're using it for right now is auto guidance it has the line setup on it and it's driving the tractor so that I don't have to guess where to drive next up we have the precision planting 20/20 monitor this is actually controlling the planter right now I have loaded the maps of the waterways and the field boundaries into this monitor and it's actually telling the rows when to shut off and when to turn on based on entering and exiting waterways and overlapping areas that we've already planted like when we pull into an end row this is the monitor that's in control of shutting each individual motor off that runs the seed disks on each row unit it's also displaying a whole bunch of information for us right now it's it's controlling and displaying the downforce which is how much pressure is applied down to each row to keep it in the ground it's showing us right now the furrow moisture the soil temperature the spacing the cingulate cingulate is a metric that describes the percentage of times that one seed is dropped every time one seed is supposed to be dropped right here we're seeing skips and multiples a skip is when we were supposed to drop a seed but we failed to and a multiple is when we dropped more than one seed in one spot and that neither of those are good we don't want to be doing that it's displaying the ride quality and our vacuum on each side of the planter and this is where I would go to control the downforce or to control the population if I wanted to change it okay and up here on the iPad probably all you're gonna see is my reflection but this is making a map right now we're looking at the cingulate map and we could look at maps of any of the things that we can see on the 20/20 monitor so I'm gonna have to find a time when the Sun isn't shining quite so good maybe at night would be a good time to show you all of the things I can do on the iPad because that's really really cool we'll have to put that on the list of things to include in an upcoming video it's just way too shiny right now to be able to show you all the cool stuff that this program can do on the iPad then up here is our control for our clean sweep row cleaners this is run by air pressure so I can raise and lower the row cleaners and I can put down pressure on them if I want to it's a really good system we really like it right now I'm running just a little bit of down pressure on them when I'm filling the planter I like to leave one or two bags out on the platform on the planter depending on whether there's an odd or even number of total bags for the field that way just in case the planter isn't exactly right on for population I can still get the planter empty or close to empty at the end of the field also if there's an odd number of bags and then maybe if there's some point rows where one side of the planter is planting more often than the other side when we're finished in the field that way I can take that last bag and get it divided equally up so that I don't run one side of the planter out and still have seed left on the other side all right he just got moved to a new field it's being ground from last year so it worked up really nice and smooth it wasn't chisel plowed it's always more fun planting on a field that had beans on it last year you don't have to deal with the root balls and it's just a lot nicer environment to plant into it looks like there's a little rain popping up on the radar maybe coming down from the north we might actually get rained out this afternoon I'm not sure but hopefully not so that beep means that it stopped planting at the end of the row so I lift it up and turn around and that's really all I have to do to get the tractor turned around is to start the turn with the steering wheel right about here I can push the auto guidance button and it'll automatically steer right into where it needs to be for the next pass drop the planter back in the ground and it'll start planting as soon as it comes out of the in row based on its GPS knowledge of where it is now that we're rocking and rolling planting the weather is kind of uncertain it looks like it might rain a little bit this week it looks like it might not I am going to pretty much throw my normal YouTube uploading schedule away and I'm just going to try to bring you guys as much content as I can there's a lot of things going on here with the planter there's a lot to know I know you guys are going to have a lot of questions and there's going to be things that you want to know about and things that you want to see more in depth and closer up so my plan is to just keep throwing videos out kind of as much as I can it might be every couple of days it might be every day for a little while it might be every three or four days it depends on how the weather goes I really don't know what to tell you I'm just planning on winging it when it comes to uploading videos because my goal is like I said I want to get as much out there for you guys to see and give you guys a chance to ask questions I might even post a video where all I do is sit in the tractor while I'm planting and just answer your questions we'll see how it goes I am here to serve you I want you to be able to learn as much and see as much as you can during this planting season that can be very short if the weather cooperates and it can drag on forever if the weather does not cooperate so if you guys have any questions things that you've seen today that you want to know more about I do plan on talking about the different types of seed that we're planting I plan on talking about the functionality of our waterways and the reasoning behind where we put them and I plan on talking some about tile and drainage of fields those are all things that I'm gonna try to cover a little bit during planting season if I can if things don't work out maybe do individual videos about each of those topics later on you go ahead and ask whatever questions you have let me know what things you want to see more of and closer up and I'll try to help you out so that you can see the things that you want to see and learn the things that you want to learn I hope you've enjoyed this video I appreciate you watching I love talking with you guys in the comment section I try my best to get to the comments as quickly as I can sometimes especially during this time of year and harvest it might take me 3 or 4 days before I can respond to your comment but I will do my best to try to reply to everybody thanks for watching thanks for riding the line and I'll see you next time whenever that is [Music] you

Channel: Dodge Brothers Farm and Ranch

Views: 16,952

Rating: 4.9924049 out of 5

Keywords: how does a corn planter work, planting corn, ask a farmer, john deere planter, drone footage, farming videos, john deere 8285R, nice machinery, farm equipment, dodge brothers, iowa corn, iowa farm

Id: OjVZoniN2no

Length: 19min 10sec (1150 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/dog_in_the_vent]

Well now I want to play Farming Simulator

[u/Challenge-Life]

This is cool.

I sell large format lawnmowers and we have some overlapping tech here