Planting Potatoes! 1200 acres in 7 days!

okay well it is planting day so we are starting to plant potatoes so we're going to go around and I'm going to show you exactly how we do it starting at the seller so here they already have a truck mostly loaded we'll go in here they are still scooping and loading so this is the cellar that we piled all of our seed in and cut all of our seat into and here's the back of the pile where it all started so we have piler going up into the truck the truck is not all the way full yet so we'll go back here and watch them scoop got potatoes running up the piler into the truck and then this is the little expandable little miniature expandable that is hooked to the Cooper so we have all of our seed potatoes here that we've cut and it looks like he's just about to pull a vent pipe out but essentially he just drives into the pile and it Scoops up the potatoes and as they fall in he knocks them down and it just kind of avalanches down look like we have a kind of broken vent pipe but they get the vent pipe out you can kind of see the the pile just starts to Avalanche in we just slowly Scoops them up and he'll go through this whole Cellar like that load up all of these sea potatoes it's kind of fun to watch them just Cascade down into the seed scooper so this is the same way that they pull all of our potatoes out of the Sellar but they have a bigger one of these this one is like 60 years old so but it still works and this piler was made in 1974 so old equipment still works if you buy good equipment from from the start that's why we buy Spud it see if we can get an avalanche to happen here oh it's starting all the seed is slowly just cascading down [Applause] this plate at the bottom helps it from overloading the belt and overloading that belt behind [Applause] me now this truck is almost full once it gets full they'll take it out to the field and they'll grab one of the empty ones all right let's head out to the field and I'll uh I'll show you how they load the trucks into the uh load from the trucks into the Planters and how we plant and how that whole process works but before I take you out to the field go down below and hit that subscribe button it's free looks like Josh just ran out so we're going to show you how we load these [Music] things so before we do that Jose is filling the uh Bucket over there but these tractors so we have fertilizer tanks on the tractors uh this one has 1,000 gallons on the tractor Christophers has 800 Trevor Has 600 but then we also have these 200g tanks on the Planters so by doing it this way we're able to just fill them once with fertilizer and then they will be able to plant all day last time we just had this one last year and so every two times they filled with spuds we had to fill it with fertilizer so by doing it this way we don't have to worry about the fertilizer we do have the fertilizer truck over there just in case one of these goes empty throughout the day cuz you can see we planted a little bit with calibrating and we're already halfway on these so what the fertilizer where that goes is it comes out of this over that John Blue Pump let's go over there so this is the John Blue Pump so it comes out to this John Blue Pump this pumps it's connected to the tire it's a ground driven [Music] pump and it will pump it'll just it's just a squeeze pump so it'll just pump and pump we have these check valves so when it's not running it won't just slowly siphon from the tank out now these hoses there's two hoses that go to Every row so they go down right here and those hoses are hooked right there so there's one here and one there the seed drops right there the fertilizer drops right next to the seed so when it's in the ground it has a bunch of fertilizer right as it starts growing to kick it off and start it growing good right behind that we have these are the closing discs so the seed will drop the closing discs will throw dirt over it and then two of our Planters have these Shanks and that just helps build the row a little bit it'll it'll pull up extra dirt and then any dirt that is Too Tall because we don't want the depth to be too deep we want it to all be uniform so any dirt that's too high this drag bar drag it off so you get nice uniform height RADS and all your seed will be at the same depth so this is how we load we have the truck and the loader we just fill the bucket up with the seed then he will back [Music] up and that's how we load the Planters it takes about half of one of these trucks for each planter so to fill all all three Planters up we use one and a half [Music] trucks want to make sure that he goes slow because ideally we don't dump the seed out onto the ground [Music] [Music] [Music] now here comes Christopher I'm sure he's empty too so we'll be loading him in a minute now I don't want any comments about oh your loader is so squeaky you got to grease that thing all that squeaking you hear is the brakes so the brakes are inside of the axles so there is no greasing or anything that's just how they sound there a little squeaky we Grease the bucket in all the joints all the time so it's been greased the squeaking you here is just the brakes now Christopher's planter is a little bit different than the other two because his is not 3o init mounted his is a full tight so his looks a little bit different it is the same setup we have to change we have the tank up there the G blue pumps on this side instead uh the only difference is this is a brand new one they move the bin back so you have more access to all these cups also you notice there's no fan right here on the new ones they've moved the fan to the back so now it's a double fan right in the back instead of having a little fan on one side big fan on the other side double fan that sh shaft driven all the way to the Tractor but this is this tractor setup it's just like the other one has a little bit different chain but yeah it does the exact same thing this one also because it is thre point or not threo it's hitch mounted it has a GPS right there cuz this one actually steers itself through the field to give you those nice straight rows but we'll get him loaded up see how much he has left in there so he's not completely empty but he probably doesn't have enough to do one more round because this field to go down and back is about a mile so they're about half mile rows so now we're just getting Christopher loaded up here his tractor his pler actually has a ladder so I'm up on top get a little bit different point of view of loading this thing so because this planter has such big back tires on the back he can't get quite as close so he has a harder time getting the potatoes up to the front but once thing get get Fuller you can kind of fill them over the top okay so in this clip the fan blew out the sound so you couldn't hear what I was saying so I'm just describing what the cups do so the cups are powered by suction the yellow hose is the suction hose the white hose is the blowoff hose and it will blow the seed off when it gets to a certain point and drop it right onto the ground now the cups they are on this planter they're made of silicone and they tend to hold the seed on pretty good so this seed is just sitting there on the cups now it falls off if you touch it but when he revs the tractor up it will hold the seat on there as it goes around now with these you can actually get really good accuracy up to 98% and as he goes faster the cups will speed up spinning faster to make sure that you get the same accuracy and there's actually been a guy who was planting at 8 mph with this planter granted if you have really rough ground that won't work very well because it'll just shake the machine but that's how these cups work and for us we're shooting for more about 5 to 6 mph range which is faster than most Planters can go now he'll be able to see with these big tires it usually bumps up against him while he's dumping oh yeah see he's bumping this tire he's trying to go just in inside the tire to get a little bit further but these big tires make it a little bit harder to load right here you can kind of see how this these closing discs and the drag bar work closing discs will close around the seed and then whatever's left up high the drag bar comes across and levels out the road so you get a nice uniform row and seat dep because if you didn't have that drag bar and you were going through the field if you had one row that the discs weren't doing quite as good you'd have really shallow depth and then the next row you might have good discs and then you have really really deep seene so we use the drag bar to level everything off and that makes the uniform uniform dep it looks like we got a couple of leaky valves here but you can see the fertilizer is dripping out of that hose right there that's kind of how the fertilizer works just kind of dri dribbles out of that pipe as it's running and puts fertilizer on the ground with the seat it's like we got another dribbly one right there Josh is currently fixing a disc on these older ones these discs there's just three little bolts that hold them on and there's a bearing in here and if that bearing goes bad it usually just snaps the disc off so looks like he's lost the disc and he's trying to get the parts to put it back on Christopher's just going to get in I'm going to hop up here and give you guys a a Qui close look at how these PL while he's going I'm just going to stand right here cuz there's more room on these than there's the other one [Music] oh [Music] all right so I just climbed up here in the tractor and I can kind of see what it looks like from the tractor you can see that squeeze pump pumping away and then you can see all the rows this tractor you have a really good view of all the rows cuz they move the bin back but you can also see now so these chains right here there's two chains on each side of each of those uh wheels and uh yeah they slowly move and drop seed in because right below them if you can see there's a little wire thing right there that's an electric eye so that electric eye shows how full the bin is and when it gets to a level where it needs more seed those chains up above will drop seed in so making sure that that bin is always full enough now you don't want it to be too full because then you start to throw the seat out the front it doesn't stick to the cups it'll just kind of throw it around but you also don't want it to be too empty because then you'll start to get misses you'll start to get cups that don't have seed on them and every once in a while you'll see a cup that doesn't have a seed on it and sometimes they just get bumped by the seed falling down or by something else and they'll fall off and then sometimes you'll also get doubles so you'll get a big seed piece with like a little sliver of a c piece next to it that's just suctioned onto that cup so you get a little you get a few skips you get a few doubles but it's like that with every planter with these Planters at 5 m hour you're about 98% 95 98% accuracy as far as spacing and the seed are actually putting into the ground so they're really good Planters we've we've really liked them at least they are a little bit more maintenance because there's a lot more moving Parts like you have the p you have all the bearings on the PTO you have the fan on the back so there are more moving Parts there's lot there is more maintenance than a normal uh like cup or a pck planter but with these we can go 5 m hour and still get that accuracy so that's why we like them all right we just got to the end of the field so you can to lift it up and then we'll turn around so this one since it steers itself when you turn the tractor it kind of turns the wheels in the back you can't really see him you can kind of see right here there's a wheel and right over here there's a wheel but those Wheels turn as he turns to keep the planter from well hitting the tractor cuz it does get pretty close so the planter kind of turns on its own when we turn which is pretty nice feature [Music] there now getting lck and back up so we can plant as much of the field as we can and then he'll drop it [Music] down so I'm not steering anything on the planter it's just all following GPS line yeah the planter has its own GPS following its own line you guys might notice that it's sunny now and that's because this is a different day I was not able to get all the filming done that first day so finishing it up today so it's a nice sunny day today now Christopher is going to kind of explain this is the monitor for the that came with the planter this is the lock so we have here this is our Master on off so when we turn the seed wheels on off this is our rais and lower it automatically raises and lowers uh we have it set at a certain height on the front the rears go down all the way you can have this return to Center and so then if you manually steer it the return to Center's on you can just hit that button and it'll go to return to Center up here so it's showing there's it's a six row planter so there's six rows and in each row there's two feeder chains so I got my right feeder chain my left feeder chain so two left right left right and that 11 is it's just a number that we put in to tell it how full to keep each bin where it's dumping the potatoes off you can see kind of see when those feeder Wheels move it show it shows the picture of potatoes dropping off of the the feeder chain anyway we have a certain chain speed so it makes sure it it uh drops it down cuz we are going about 5 m an hour um this uh this blue bar here so it has the drop sensors so when the seat is dropping uh it it kind of counts or just makes sure that what the seat is doing so it says the average here of 92% it'll alarm us if it gets below 70 um up here our Target is 11.75 in per seat piece so that's it shows how many seeds you're using per acre um here's our actual what it's planting our speed up there and then the 10.5 acres per hour and that's how many feet we've planted since we turned hit the on button so then you can also go to here this is our depth on the front I can raise and lower the front and then I just hit the save button or this save button to set the depth so that's I mean it's pretty simple there's a lot more calibrations and stuff you can go into you know this shows you your your seeds and I haven't really played with all that you can do totals hours Acres shows since this machine is new I've done a total of 106 Acres it also tells us right here trip trip one trip two 106 Acres so there's three machinein so we are probably I think we're just shy of 400 Acres or so uh I do have a camera on the back I can look at the back it's nice when you're backing up to something you're not going to hit something um yeah that's about it it's I mean I really like this system this Monitor and setup uh a lot better than the old systems you don't have to use the sprayer Raven sprayer controls anymore like in the old Planters so I mean I'm still learning a lot about it but for the most part it's I really like it so like you said we're using three Planters so yesterday they planted about 200 Acres so we're doing roughly around 200 Acres a day so we're planting 1200 Acres so they should be able to get done in 6 days if everything goes well but uh that's not always the case like this planter right here that's coming by this is our oldest one for 2004 and it tends to have the most problems but right now we have that other planter way back at the other end of the field over there he keeps breaking the discs off the back the closing discs [Music] so yeah this is planting potatoes and so we we had a question on how we plant where pivots are so we have two we actually have two pivots right next to each other one for the field on that side one for the field on this side and basically how we plant those is we'll move the pivot out of the way we'll plant where the pivot sits then move the pivot back and then plant on this side or the other way to do it is you plant over here and once you get enough planted over here you move the pivot over and then go plant where the pivot sits so there's a couple ways to do it but basically you just move the pivot out of the way Plant it and move it back that's how you plant around the [Music] pivots we got all three of them filling up now Christopher just got full so he's taking off [Music] [Music] [Music] okay I hope you guys have enjoyed this video about planting potatoes make sure to subscribe so you don't missx what happens next with the dammer Dyer and enjoy this Drone footage [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] he oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] oh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I [Music] a [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Rocky Mountain Farmer

Views: 225,605

Keywords: Farm, farming, farmer, Farmlife, John Deere, tractor, tractors, family farm, family friendly, kids farm videos, agriculture, rural life, millennial farmer, Laura farms, Welker farms, Idaho, Ronald esplin farms, Rocky Mountain farmer, harvest, Equipment, farm adventures, vlog, working, agribusiness, teaching, educational, DIY, dirt, Planting, Potatoes, Potato, Spud, Planter, How to, Step by step, Large, Field, Fieldwork, Lockwood, Airecup, Case, Seed, Planting potatoes, How to plant potatoes, Potato harvest

Id: cg8cwV44vmM

Length: 30min 11sec (1811 seconds)

Published: Sat May 11 2024