Last year, we rented an Allis Chalmers G to cultivate our eight acres of organic vegetables. It came with a gang of four Planet Jr. seeders set up on ten-inch centers. Convinced that seeding from a tractor must be more efficient, we attempted to put the seeders to use, but we discovered – not nearly quickly enough – that we were spending far too much time switching plates and seeds on four seeders in tight quarters. By mid-summer, we had returned to pushing our (somewhat) trusty Earthway around the farm, with far less cussing and far better stands. We set out to find a better way, if there was one, and this is what we found.

Moving up with seeders
As anybody knows who has ever seeded a crop by hand, a good seeder will pay for itself quickly in terms of time and accuracy. A good stand of beans or carrots makes everything from weed control to harvest more efficient, and increases your yields besides. And the right seeder set-up for your farm will make seeding those crops go fas]ter, allowing more time for that more-efficient weed control and harvest, or for spending time with your children.

Like any equipment purchase, the right seeder configuration for your farm depends on your scale, your aptitudes, your management needs, and even your markets. Are you seeding a half-acre of carrots at a time, or do you plant a dozen varieties of crops every time you step out the door? Does your temper grow short when you have to monkey with machinery? Do you do all of the seeding yourself, or do you need to be able to delegate it? Do you need perfectly sized beets, or do you have a use for a variety of sizes? All of these things go into making a decision about the seeder and the level of investment that makes sense for you. More expensive is not always better!

Tractor-mount or hand-push?
Mounting multiple seeders on a tool-bar may seem to be the best option for more efficient seeding with precision spacing between the rows. But with a gang of seeders, you may find yourself spending more time changing seeder settings than you spend actually seeding the crop, especially in a diversified market garden or CSA. Your initial level of investment will also be higher, and the cost of mistakes much greater.

Dan Guenthner, of Common Ground Farm in Osceola, Wisconsin, suggests that hand-pushed seeders may be the best option for up to ten acres of production. He uses chains welded onto the rolling cage behind his Lely Roterra to mark out his rows. “We are experimenting with high-residue tillage”, he says, “and pushing the seeder by hand lets me stop easily to remove a chunk of un-decomposed organic matter. I can’t do that efficiently from a tractor seat.”

Other farmers use any variety of row-marking tools that trail behind the tractor, including lawn-mower wheels on a common axle, hitch-pins in a square metal tube, or shanks on a toolbar – anything to provide precision spacing. Attached to the final tillage implement or bed shaper, marking the rows won’t require a special trip through the field. At Beech Hill Farm in Maine, Kim and I were able to seed accurately enough using Earthway seeders that we had practically no hand weeding required following tractor-mounted cultivation.

The Planet Junior – Old Reliable
Planet Junior seeders haven’t been around forever – it just seems that way. Old photos of seeding in the market garden almost always include Planet Junior seeders. CSA farmer Dan Kaplan (Brookfield Farm, Amherst, Massachusetts) uses them for seeding everything on the farm except sweet corn.

The workings of the Planet Junior rely on the same principle as a grain drill – by adjusting the size of the hole in the bottom of the seed hopper, you change the rate of seed flow. The planting shoes come in different shapes that affect depth and width of the seed row, sweeps close the row, and a packer wheel provides good seed-to-soil contact. The large front drive wheel turns a brush inside the hopper that keeps the seed moving.

Changing the hole size on the Planet Junior takes a bit of work. Three different plates provide a total of 39 hole sizes. If your seed sizes are all on one plate, you simply undo a cam lock and spin the plate; but changing plates takes a little more than two minutes with experience, according to Linda Halley of Harmony Valley Farm, in Viroqua, Wisconsin. (I found them to take a lot longer than that, but I had learned how to use them without any instruction.)

Linda notes that the parts on different seeders tend to vary a little. If you use more than one seeder, don’t mix parts from different units once you find a set that works well together.

Finding the right hole size takes some trial and error, and that can be costly if you don’t zero in on the correct size quickly – most northern growers only plant a few successions of crops like carrots and beets. Indeed, this was the most frequent complaint about the Planet Junior: figuring out the seeding rate is not a matter of fitting the seed to the hole and doing some math to determine the correct ground speed, but instead requires guesswork and adjustment.

Calibration can be done by simply spinning the drive wheel, but actually driving is better. The ground speed of the seeder makes some difference in the rate of flow, especially when accelerating and stopping at the ends of rows with tractor-mounted models. Because stopping and starting happen more quickly when the seeder is pushed by hand, Dan Guenthner notes that this is less of a problem for hand-pushed models, although steady speed is important to prevent skipping.

Planet Juniors are substantial seeders, with parts made of cast metal. A new Planet Junior will cost in excess of $500, but it will last forever. Look around and you might find a used Planet Junior for much less than that. Dan Guenthner notes, “We paid $50 for ours, and it’s going to outlive me.”

The venerable Earthway
Almost everybody starts market farming with an Earthway Vegetable Seeder. Its lightweight aluminum and plastic construction, inexpensive price tag ($70 at the local farm supply store), and simple adjustments make it a great place to begin, but quickly leaves most farmers feeling like they need something more.

Still, Paul Arnold of Pleasant Valley Farm in Argyle, New York, relies on the Earthway for the majority of his seeding needs after 15 years of market gardening. He seeds an average of 12 different varieties each time he goes out to seed – that’s 12 different sizes of seed, and probably 12 different holes if he were using a Planet Junior. To seed four kinds of carrots with differently sized seeds, he just uses the same plate. And switching plates for a new crop only takes 30 seconds.
Because the plates on the Earthway drop seeds in clumps, it doesn’t provide the almost-perfect spacing that a Planet Junior does. Beets and carrots might not grow to uniform size, but that doesn’t matter for Paul, who sells everything through farmers markets. “We have markets for all kinds and sizes of carrots, even the screwy ones get sold for juicing. And if we can’t sell them, we eat them or feed them to the pigs.” The same is true for other crops where spacing is critical, such as turnips and beets.

The 12 plates available for the Earthway does limit the adjustability of this seeder, particularly when working with low-germ seed or conditions, like summer-planted spinach. Paul has a Planet Junior that he uses as a backup when the Earthway won’t put in enough seeds. At our farm, we just make two trips for each row.

The Earthway is definitely manufactured for light use. The aluminum and plastic parts wear quickly. At $70 each, you can afford to get a new one every two years. Old seeders can be relegated to duty side-dressing fertilizer with the optional attachment. The Earthway is a very versatile seeder, Paul notes, “but you have to realize its limitations.”

Precision seeding with a Stanhay
The Stanhay seeder is truly a precision seeder, providing spacing that’s more consistent than a seed drill like the Planet Junior or a plate seeder with the limited adjustability of an Earthway. It can seed up to three lines of seeds just one inch apart. It uses a combination of ground-driven punched belts and gears to provide consistent spacing, even down to establishing a hex pattern between the seed rows to maximize growing space for each plant.

Unfortunately, the belts are custom made for each type of seeds, and work best with round or pelleted seeds. The Stanhay is designed more for seeding large monocrop operations than a diversified market garden. Typically, a grower would buy in seeds for the season, then send a sample to have a belt custom made for that year’s seeds. Since belts cost about $50 each, this would hardly be cost-effective in a small market garden!

The resulting crop is highly uniform since every plant has optimal spacing, a requirement for the wholesale markets that large monocrop operations typically sell through. Because the belt is ground-driven, speed doesn’t affect the seed spacing.

The multiple rows provide a high plant density, and a better canopy for weed control compared to a single line of seeds, although Richard de Wilde of Harmony Valley Farm seeds his root crops with a Stanhay on single lines to facilitate close cultivation.

Dan Guenthner uses a hand-pushed Stanhay only for carrots and beans, but he says the investment – a new seeder currently costs about $2,000 once you buy a set of belts – was worth it. “The price tag was a hard pill to swallow initially,” Dan says, “but we’ve had the Stanhay for six years and our carrot production gets better each year.” Although he likes the results he gets with the Stanhay, he only uses it for carrots and beans because it takes quite a bit of effort to adjust and the belts are so expensive. Although he uses a Planet Junior for the rest of his crops, he found that the occasional skips in the drill-type seeder created weed-control problems in slow-germinating crops like carrots; the Stanhay eliminated this problem.

Pinpoint seeders
Pinpoint seeders also provide precision spacing of crops in the row. Rather than a belt, pinpoint seeders utilize a ground-driven rotating drum with round holes to catch the seeds, then drop them down a chute. Handheld models, such as the one- and four-row seeders available from Johnny’s and After the Till, use the axle for this drum, and drop the seeds directly into the furrow. Brushes that remove excess seeds provide further adjustment.

Multiple row models seem to be universally spaced at 2-1/4 inches, and work well for seeding salad mix, spinach, radishes, or other densely grown crops. The intensive seeding works great if you have the fertility to maintain it, and contributes to efficient harvest although weed control can be a problem since the rows can’t be cultivated – hand weeding and stale beds are about the only option. Round seeds work best, although we have had good luck with lettuce.

The pinpoint seeder is definitely a tool, as Eliot Coleman notes, and not a machine. The operator controls depth manually using the height of the handle, and the brush settings are inexact at best; as a manager, you can’t send somebody out with a recipe and expect them to get the same results you did.

Pinpoint seeders also require finely prepared soil, without rocks, clods, or chunks of un-decomposed organic matter, to function properly. The bed left by a rototiller typically works well. Because the seeder doesn’t have a furrow closing mechanism, we follow with a lawn roller to lightly bury the seed and provide good seed-to-soil contact.

The new Glaser seeder advertised in the 2002 Johnny’s catalog works the same way, although it is made to also attach to wheel hoes manufactured by the same company. It is a single-row seeder, and incorporates some extra features like a packing wheel and a Plexiglas cover, but it doesn’t seem to be a dramatic improvement over the standard seeder. When attached to a wheel hoe, the depth was slightly more difficult to control than it was with the straight wooden handle; the seed hopper was also more difficult to empty, and it seems that it would be even more so with more than one unit attached to the optional toolbar.

European Dema seeders work on the same principle, except that a belt drives the rotating drum from rollers in front of and behind the seeding mechanism. Changeable gears on the belt allows for variable spacing in the row, something that can’t be achieved with the handheld models to the same degree of precision. The mechanisms used to adjust seed spacing on the Dema seeder makes it possible to send an employee or intern out to the field with a “recipe” for seeding with the confidence that it will be the same every time.

Dema also manufactures a self-propelled ride-on model that allows for planting without leaving space for wheel tracks. But the precision and simplicity of the Dema seeders doesn’t come without a price – 3-point models start at about $8,000 (including shipping from Europe).

As nice as it would be to find a seeder system that “does it all”, such a goal probably isn’t realistic. Most seeders will do a great job on some crops, an adequate job on most crops, and a bad job on a few other crops – we tried to use our Planet Junior seeders for sweet corn last year, and we won’t make that mistake again! Most farmers that I have spoken to use more than one seeder to accomplish their seeding tasks, and some use three or four.

To find the right seeder system for your farm, you need to have a clear understanding of what you require from your seeders, how much capital you have available, the scale of your operation, and your management needs. The right decision will make every aspect of your farming job easier, from seeding to harvest.

Sources
Red Cardinal Enterprises
651-653-8038
info@greensmachines.com
www.greensmachines.com (coming online in late spring)
Dema seeder

Johnny’s Selected Seeds
207-437-4395
www.johnnyseeds.com
four-row pinpoint seeder
Glaser seeder
Earthway seeder

After the Till
800-313-9935
four-row pinpoint seeder

Market Farm Implement
814-443-1931
www.marketfarm.com
Planet Junior seeder and parts

DeVries Manufacturing, Inc.
507-889-8801
Stanhay seeders