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.

“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.”

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At the Ag in Motion farm show this summer, Grainews senior machinery editor Scott Garvey spoke with Väderstad CEO Henrik Gilstring about the company’s acquisition of Saskatchewan-based Seed Hawk and how that figures into its North American operations, as well as how important the Canadian market is to the company’s global operations.

The post VIDEO: Väderstad’s plan for the North American farm equipment market appeared first on Grainews.

“More capacity” was the big news from Vaderstad’s staff at their Seed Hawk seeding equipment display during Ag in Motion this past July. The centrepiece of the company’s exhibit was the introduction of a brand new PD 1350 air cart, with bushel capacity to match the model number.

“The PD 1350 is an extension of our already proven cart line,” Vaderstad’s business development manager Chris Bettschen says. “We already have a PD 400, PD 680, PD 820, PD 1000 and now the big brother to all of them, the PD 1350. It’s exactly what it sounds like, 1,350-bushel capacity, four bins, with our proven Fenix III meters underneath.”

VIDEO: Seed Hawk PD 1350 air cart a big deal

Included in those four bins is a larger canola tank mounted at the front, accessible from the forward catwalk.

“The canola bin on this one is actually quite large,” he adds. “It’s a 93-bushel bin, still at the front of the cart. But this way customers can use it for any product.”

The PD 1350 is the first Seed Hawk cart to include brakes on the rear axle, which isn’t surprising given its weight and the energy required to bring it to a stop when full. To carry that weight, the cart rides on dual wheels on both the front and rear axles.

“This cart, on the front, actually has lower ground pressure than the PD 1000, because of the duals,” Bettschen says. “There’s no track option and no other tire option. You get 900s on the back and 710s on the front.”

To get the extra capacity, the bins on the PD 1350 are wider than on the brand’s smaller tanks, but they don’t add anything to the overall road width of the cart at the outside of the tires.

“We’ve changed the orientation,” Bettschen says. “You’ll notice the bins are quite a bit wider than our originals. So we didn’t add height, we added width. But it’s contained within the tires, so road transport doesn’t change, but capacity got a lot larger.”

The Fenix III metering system can route the contents of any of the tanks into either the seed or fertilizer air streams, allowing growers to place starter fertilizer with the seed. And the electric meters provide individual control for each 10-foot drill section.

“It’s a double shoot system,” Bettschen says. “The carts are configurable. You can put everything down the seed knife, everything down the fertilizer knife or any combination in between.”

To get seed and fertilizer into the cart, an AGI conveyor is an option, which should be able to completely fill the cart within 30 minutes.

“The AGI conveyor is an option, which we developed along with them and made some tweaks to,” he says. “And their performance in 2024 has been excellent. On this cart, under the right conditions, you should be able to fill in under half an hour, start to stop.”

Seed Hawk continues to use the side-banding, dual-knife opener that has been a hallmark of the brand for decades.

“The Seed Hawk dual-knife opener was one of the original two-knife systems on the market,” Bettschen says. “Fertilizer in the front, seed in behind, nice and close to the packer tire for good depth control.

“We do have a few packer tire options, but our original leaves the cupped furrow you’re looking for to give excellent seed and fertilizer placement while maintaining separation. Dual beams on the opener give it structural strength as you’re moving across the field; whether you have rocks, curves or anything else you can throw at it, these openers will stand up.”

PD 1350 carts will be available in limited quantities for the 2025 season, with full production available for 2026.

The post Vaderstad introduces a 1,350-bushel Seed Hawk air cart appeared first on Grainews.

There’s Vaderstad’s trademark red colour, and its attention to detail in building of planters and drills, including its E-Control data management system.

But the 600-900 C also has the Seed Hawk opener system and carries the name, as the leader of the high-capacity no-till drill section of Vaderstad’s business.

As expected, Vaderstad, has taken the strong points of the Seed Hawk drills and moved them into a broader range of global products.

The Seed Hawk 600-900 Combination drill had its global launch at Agritechnica, the major farm machinery show at Hannover, Germany. The drill is expected to sell around the world, although it won’t have the appeal of its larger sister drills in Western Canada.

Chris Bettschen, who manages Vaderstad sales to Australia and New Zealand from his base in Canada, says the drill will have a larger market in Europe and Australia and New Zealand, but would also be of particular interest in Eastern Canada.

Those knowledgeable with Seed Hawk drills will recognize the dual knife opener and on-row packing from Seed Hawk on the 600-900 C.

“It also has a front disc to allow us to go through more residue than our standard Seed Hawk machines,” Bettschen said at Agritechnica.

“Realistically, it’s meant for our small- to medium-sized farmers that still want the precision technology of a Seed Hawk but don’t need the larger scale out of the Canadian factory.”

Several technology options are available for the new machine, such as the SeedEye system and more hydraulic control, and all those options were on the version displayed at the show.

The machine requires about seven horsepower per opener, so on an eight-metre machine with 32 openers, a 200-horsepower tractor would be required to pull it.

The machine will also have the Vaderstad E-Control system for management of data. It will be manufactured in Sweden.

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“We’ve had a planter for quite a while now, and we can get farmers to buy into using a planter for canola,” explains Phillip Korczak, regional sales manager at Seed Hawk. “They understand the benefits of it. But usually the question they ask after that is, ‘How do I put my fertilizer down.’ And to this point, with the bulk fertilizer you need for canola, (the answer is) is some sort of additional pass or several passes perhaps.”

Eliminating the need for those extra passes is what the concept machine on display is designed to do.

“We spent a lot of time in the last decade with guys doing one-pass applications, and that’s what they want out of a planter (too),” he continues. “So we’re one of the only companies that has access to an air seeder tank on the Seed Hawk side of things, as well as a planter on the Väderstad side. So we decided to marry the two together this year. Using the Seed Hawk tank as our bulk fertilizer delivery, but yet we get the accuracy of the planter.

“With the planter you see here, if you filled up all the hoppers with canola, you have about 300 acres of capacity on the seed side, but we only had about 140 bushel fertilizer tank (with the standard Tempo planter design).”

The concept planter ramps up that fertilizer capacity pretty significantly by bolting on an off-the-shelf 660-bushel air cart, which is built in the Seed Hawk plant in Saskatchewan. The planter is one of Väderstad’s Tempo models built in Sweden. (Väderstad is the parent company of Seed Hawk.) But marrying that trans-Atlantic couple together still requires some engineering to get both machines’ digital components to work together seamlessly.

“The way we ran it this spring there are actually two separate systems,” says Korczak. “They both had their own iPad. One controlling the Tempo planter and one controlling the Seed Hawk tank.”

Of course, producers buying a new seeding rig won’t settle for that level of complexity. So the challenge for engineers is to develop a digital system that will look familiar to producers, especially those who already use Seed Hawk or Väderstad equipment, and is easy to use. So the company put this concept machine in the field to get some end-user feedback. They wanted to get a better idea what that system, and the overall machine design, should look like from an owner’s perspective.

“It (field testing) was more of a proof of concept this year,” he says. “Is this something that’s going to work? We got some feedback from our customers, is this something that you’d like? What else do we need on it to make it viable for your operation? I think we did a good job with it this spring, and we’re going to move forward with it.”

So far, however, this planter design remains just a concept, and it won’t be on the market for a while.

“The producers that have used it, some have actually asked us if they could buy it,” says Korczak. “At this point, no. But we were showing it at the demos at Ag in Motion, and people that came forward at the booth were quite interested in this combination. You get the accuracy with the planter in canola to reduce your seeding rate and ultimately put your fertilizer down with one pass.

Among those producer comments was one aimed at the planter.

“There are a couple of key features we’ve been told by customers that we need to be competitive in the market,” he says. “One of them being 15-inch spacing. The narrowest we currently offer is 17.7. We’re working on a 15-inch machine as well as central fill for seed so you don’t have to fill up individual (row unit) hoppers.”

So, will Seed Hawk/Väderstad eventually hit the market with a planter offering 15-inch row spacing and a high capacity fertilizer tank to blend the best of an air drill with the precision accuracy of a planter for canola? Korczak thinks it’s likely to happen in the not-too-distant future.

“In the next several years we could have some pretty exciting products in the market,” he says.

The post Seed Hawk blends technologies into new planting unit appeared first on Grainews.

Seed Hawk, which has been 100 per cent owned by Swedish equipment manufacturer Vaderstad since 2013, has been renamed Vaderstad Industries effective Tuesday.

The two companies said the name change “reflects the fuller integration of the Seed Hawk brand within the Vederstad Group, bringing precision and quality together.”

The change was telegraphed earlier this year when Seed Hawk adopted red paint for all its seeding systems, in line with Vaderstad’s colours.

However, Vaderstad Industries CEO Nigel Jones said in a release, “the Seed Hawk seeder will continue to be sold under the same equipment name and by the same local people our customers know and trust.”

Jones was named Seed Hawk’s new CEO on Tuesday last week, having served as its vice-president of operations for three years and as vice-president of research and development since late last year.

As CEO, Jones replaces Birgitta Ewerlof, who had been on the job since May, having relocated to Saskatchewan from her post as Vaderstad’s acting interim manager of components in Sweden.

Seed Hawk was founded at Langbank, Sask. in 1992 by brothers Pat and Norbert Beaujot with Brian Kent and Brian Dean. Norbert Beaujot went on to set up SeedMaster, a separate company, in 2002.

Seed Hawk first partnered with Vaderstad in 2006 when the Swedish company sought out a manufacturer to help develop a large-scale seeder for markets in Eastern Europe.

“The joining of our businesses will positively impact the advancement and availability of our equipment for farmers in North America and around the world,” Jones said Tuesday. — AGCanada.com Network

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That metering system represented a major change in technology for the brand. But in the past two seasons some farmers experienced problems with the meters when seeding certain products. At this year’s Canada’s Farm Progress show, the brand announced it had redesigned that metering system to address those issues.

The result of that redesign is the new Fenix III metering system, which has undergone field trials in Europe through Seed Hawk’s parent company Väderstad.

“We experienced a few problems with the metering system we introduced a couple of years ago,” explains Peter Clarke, Seed Hawk president and CEO. “This update addresses all the issues our farmers identified in the spring of 2015 and 2016.”

To prevent dust and fines from getting into the drive motors, which caused trouble in the previous system, they have now been moved outside of the housing body and have a quick attach system that allows for easy and fast in-field changes.

“This is a larger motor than we had on our iCon system previously,” says Clarke. “This is a 40 watt motor versus our 10 watt system. It sits outside the meter housing, so it addresses issues of contamination that we faced over the past few springs.”

To accommodate moving the electric motors, the meter housing, itself, needed a redesign. Engineers used that opportunity to make some improvements to the flow of product through them as well. The company claims higher rates of product can now flow more easily through the meter body compared to the 2014 design.

“The roller, itself, has changed in terms of material type,” he adds. “It’s a polyurethane product. And the shape and design of the roller actually works seamlessly with the meter housing to improve product flow.”

For growers who purchased air carts in the last two years and have experienced trouble with the previous metering system, they will be able to change over to the new Fenix III system.

“The Fenix III system is retrofittable to all iCon systems that are on the market today,” says Clarke. “And our plan is to release this into our new 2017 model year beginning production in the fall. And the entire system works better than we’ve ever had before.”

For a video look at the new Fenix III metering system and an explanation of its design from company president and CEO Peter Clarke, visit e-QuipTV.

The post Seed Hawk replaces its metering system appeared first on Grainews.

Seed Hawk used the Regina event to introduce its 2016 model year lineup to the marketplace. And the changes built into the new seeding equipment it is about to release are significant.

“We’ve got an all new tank, new metering system and new control system,” says Beaujot. “It’s been two or three years in testing. These things don’t come quickly.”

The company will stretch the working width of its 2016 drills to 84 feet. Behind (or in front of) those drills, the product tanks feeding seed and fertilizer to them will be much different. The new four-model line of tanks have capacities that range from 500 to 980 bushels. The two smaller ones (500 and 660 bushels) are available as either tow-between or tow-behind models. The larger two (800 and 980 bushels) come in tow-behind versions only.

These redesigned tanks are now all modular, and they include load cells on each compartment to weigh the contents, helping improve metering accuracy. They also supply the necessary data for the monitor to compute the number of acres that can be seeded before the compartments run dry.

“There are three load cells on each tank,” Beaujot explains. “The reason our guys decided three was the right number is that way there is always weight on each cell. We’ve also increased the resolution on the load cells to get more accurate metering.”

“We’ve been asked to put a fourth tank on for a number of years,” he continues. “And here it is. It’s a (40 bushel) canola or small-product tank. We have much bigger flotation tires as well.”

But under the carts at the meter is where things really look different. The redesigned modular metering system has gone entirely electric, with an individual motor driving each roller. Electric control provides instant stop-start control to enhance the brand’s Sectional Control Technology, and it makes immediate rate adjustments possible right from the cab.

• From Grainews’ Equip TV: Seed Hawk’s new electric, modular metering system

“There are a lot of things that can be done with an electric meter that can’t be done with hydraulic or mechanically driven rollers,” Beaujot adds. “It’s a lot simpler system to operate.”

Each meter section is an independent module made from a polymer (plastic) that is designed to withstand corrosion. Rerouting product between two different airstreams, installing any of three different metering rollers or taking the meter apart to remove an obstruction are now all very quick and simple procedures.

“It’s all plastic, so it will handle fertilizer or any products you want to throw at it.,” says Beaujot. “It’s easy to take apart and clean or check.”

When it comes to the in-cab monitor and controlling that meter, things are radically different there too. No longer will Seed Hawk equipment use Raven technology. Instead, the brand has moved to a system it calls iCon, which is its own wireless meter control created by U.S.-based Apario Systems. iCon has been designed specifically for Seed Hawk drills, notes Beaujot. Because its not an off-the-shelf, generic system, it’s highly compatible with the brand’s machines, easy and intuitive to use, he adds.

With data transfer and control going wireless, there is no longer a need to route an awkward harness into the tractor cab, and the system uses an ordinary iPad as a monitor. Wireless sensors also send blockage warnings to the same iPad.

“A good meter is nothing without a good control system, so what we’ve come up with is iCon,” says Beaujot. “We’re using an iPad for a screen in the tractor. You can use one or two iPads. You can set the rates with it, check your blockage or all kinds of good stuff. Or you can have it in your half ton and follow around the guy that’s operating if you wanted to.”

And Beaujot hinted Seed Hawk’s iCon system will allow for even more advanced precision farming features in the next generation of updates. “In the future there may be turn compensation,” he says.

For a video look at the new meter and iCon control system, go online to grainews.ca and watch the Equip TV episode.

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