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A two row planter featuring John Deere "71 Flexi" row units John Deere MaxEmerge XP Planter with Case IH AFS precision farming system which auto-steers using GPS A Kinze 2200 planter A planter is a
farm implement Agricultural equipment is any kind of machinery used on a farm to help with farming. The best-known example of this kind is the tractor. Tractor and power *Tractor / Two-wheel tractor *Tracked tractor / Caterpillar tractor Soil cultivat ...
, usually towed behind a
tractor A tractor is an engineering vehicle specifically designed to deliver a high tractive effort (or torque) at slow speeds, for the purposes of hauling a trailer or machinery such as that used in agriculture, mining or construction. Most commo ...
, that sows (plants)
seed A seed is an embryonic plant enclosed in a protective outer covering, along with a food reserve. The formation of the seed is a part of the process of reproduction in seed plants, the spermatophytes, including the gymnosperm and angiosper ...
s in rows throughout a field. It is connected to the tractor with a drawbar or a
three-point hitch The three-point hitch (British English: three-point linkage) is a widely used type of hitch for attaching ploughs and other implements to an agricultural or industrial tractor. The three points resemble either a triangle, or the letter A. Three-p ...
. Planters lay the seeds down in precise manner along rows. Planters vary greatly in size, from 1 row to 54, with the biggest in the world being the 48-row John Deere DB120. Such larger and newer planters comprise multiple
modules Broadly speaking, modularity is the degree to which a system's components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use. The concept of modularity is used primarily to reduce complexity by breaking a s ...
called row units. The row units are spaced evenly along the planter at intervals that vary widely by crop and locale. The most common row spacing in the United States today is 30 inches. __TOC__


Design

Various machines meter out seeds for sowing in rows. The ones that handle larger seeds tend to be called planters, whereas the ones that handle smaller seeds tend to be called seed drills, grain drills, and seeders (including precision seeders). They all share a set of similar
concept Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by ...
s in the ways that they work, but there is established
usage The usage of a language is the ways in which its written and spoken variations are routinely employed by its speakers; that is, it refers to "the collective habits of a language's native speakers", as opposed to idealized models of how a languag ...
in which the machines for sowing some
crop A crop is a plant that can be grown and harvested extensively for profit or subsistence. When the plants of the same kind are cultivated at one place on a large scale, it is called a crop. Most crops are cultivated in agriculture or hydropon ...
s including
maize Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maĆ­z after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American English, North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples of Mexico, indigenous ...
(corn),
bean A bean is the seed of several plants in the family Fabaceae, which are used as vegetables for human or animal food. They can be cooked in many different ways, including boiling, frying, and baking, and are used in many traditional dishes th ...
s, and
pea The pea is most commonly the small spherical seed or the seed-pod of the flowering plant species ''Pisum sativum''. Each pod contains several peas, which can be green or yellow. Botanically, pea pods are fruit, since they contain seeds and d ...
s are mostly called planters, whereas those that sow
cereal A cereal is any grass cultivated for the edible components of its grain (botanically, a type of fruit called a caryopsis), composed of the endosperm, germ, and bran. Cereal grain crops are grown in greater quantities and provide more food ...
s are drills. On smaller and older planters, a marker extends out to the side half the width of the planter and creates a line in the field where the tractor should be centered for the next pass. The marker is usually a single
disc harrow A disc harrow is a harrow whose cutting edges are a row of concave metal discs, which may be scalloped or set at an oblique angle. It is an agricultural implement that is used to till the soil where crops are to be planted. It is also used to ...
disc on a rod on each side of the planter. On larger and more modern planters, GPS navigation and auto-steer systems for the tractor are often used, eliminating the need for the marker. Some precision farming equipment such as Case IH AFS uses GPS/RKS and computer-controlled planter to sow seeds to precise position accurate within 2 cm. In an irregularly shaped field, the precision farming equipment will automatically hold the seed release over area already sewn when the tractor has to run overlapping pattern to avoid obstacles such as trees. Older planters commonly have a seed bin for each row and a fertilizer bin for two or more rows. In each seed bin plates are installed with a certain number of teeth and tooth spacing according to the type of seed to be sown and the rate at which the seeds are to be sown. The tooth size (actually the size of the space between the teeth) is just big enough to allow one seed in at a time but not big enough for two. Modern planters often have a large bin for seeds that are distributed to each row known as central commodity systems. A class of planters that dig down farther than others are called listers. They are not used much any more, as their use belonged to a set of high-
till image:Geschiebemergel.JPG, Closeup of glacial till. Note that the larger grains (pebbles and gravel) in the till are completely surrounded by the matrix of finer material (silt and sand), and this characteristic, known as ''matrix support'', is d ...
methods that low-till and no-till methods have largely replaced. Corn listers were common on the
Great Plains The Great Plains (french: Grandes Plaines), sometimes simply "the Plains", is a broad expanse of flatland in North America. It is located west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, a ...
in the 1920s through 1950s.


Drive systems

There are different types of planters available with the main difference being mechanically driven vs. hydraulic/electrical driven. In a mechanical drive system the unit works by a small suspended tire being driven by another which is in contact with the ground (driven) tire. As the operator lowers the planter the two tires make contact and the planter is engaged. When the driven wheel begins to turn it then turns a series of gears that determine the population of the seed produced. The gears can be changed by the operator in order to change the planting population. A hydraulic driven system came about to correct the shortfalls of the ground driven system. Hydraulic driven systems allow the operator to change population on the go, as well as allowing the computer controller to follow a prepared prescription for an individual field. The system also allowed for plant populations to be infinite in that mechanical gears systems are limited to set number of population settings and gears available from manufactures. In 2014
John Deere Deere & Company, doing business as John Deere (), is an American corporation that manufactures agricultural machinery, heavy equipment, forestry machinery, diesel engines, drivetrains (axles, transmissions, gearboxes) used in heavy equipment, ...
introduced the ExactEmerge row unit which introduced high-speed planting. Precision Planting followed suit and released the vDrive system. These system were unique, not that they were electrical, but that they allowed an operator to double their speed when planting. Other manufacturers had already developed an electrical planter, but lacked these additional improvements. Traditionally, an operator would plant at about 4.5-5.5 mph for optimal performance. However, with the advent of these systems electrical motors match the speed of the tractor and "dead-drop" the seed in the trench using either a belt or brush-belt which cause the forward momentum of the planter to be offset by the rearward momentum of the seed. Older systems would instead drop the seed through a tube after the meter rather than place it in the seed trench directly.


See also

* Seed drill


References

{{Authority control Agricultural machinery