With drier growing conditions over many areas of the Prairies in the last couple of seasons, some growers applying high rates of fertilizer have been experiencing incidents of toxicity with seed.
That problem has led some to look for different opener knives for their air drills that provide more seed-to-fertilizer separation.
“We had customers come to us and ask if we had anything with more separation on the Seed Hawk (drills), because they were seeing some seed burn with the factory setup,” Dutch Agriculture territory manager Connor Bohachewski says.
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“The last two or three years have been on the drier end of growing seasons. With that there’s been a risk of seed burn and fertilizer toxicity.”
That customer feedback led the Pilot Butte, Sask. company to develop the UHS (Ultra High Separation) opener knife, designed to fit Väderstad’s Seed Hawk air drills.
“At Dutch we pride ourselves on listening to our customers and what they want (and) what they’re asking us for,” Bohachewski says. “And that’s exactly where that came from.”
The UHS knife maintains the same three-quarters-of-an-inch vertical separation, but adds an inch of horizontal distance, increasing the horizontal space between the seed and fertilizer to 2-1/2 inches from the stock distance of 1-1/2 inches.
The UHS design has undergone field trials over the past two seasons on a number of different drills. Bohachewski says the results have been very good.
“We’ve been getting the separation we want without any more soil movement than any other type of knife. We haven’t run into any mud plugging issues yet. It’s been a really good success story for us.
“We haven’t seen more draught or a slower seeding speed. We haven’t seen any issues with trash flow. If anything, it’s actually been a little bit better.”
The new openers were released to the market in October, and the company expects to have roughly 30 sets available for the next growing season.
Besides the UHS, Dutch Agriculture is also introducing the Razor Series of knives, which fit several drill makes and models and allow for different vertical seed-to-fertilizer separations.
“It’s a design that we knew was going to interact with the soil well,” Bohachewski says. “This project has been going on for a couple of years already. At the top end of the opener, where it fits to the drill, we made it fit a bunch of different models.”
The company has also added new heavy-duty knives designed for SeedMaster, John Deere P600 and Bourgault drills to its product line. They use bolted connections to make replacement easier.
Bohachewski says all of the new designs have been subjected to extensive field trials to make sure they are capable of good performance in all soil types.
“This year we prototyped with about 25 different producers. So it’s not like we’re just trying them with one guy. We’re getting different guys in different areas to try stuff for us to make sure it’s going to work everywhere. We want to put this stuff through the wringer off the start and make sure it’s good to release to everybody.”
