Years of research pays off with new products
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Cory Muhlbauer, PTx research agronomist, explains what a big impact the direction of a seed has in planting. The ArrowTube, available for 2027 planting season, controls the seed orientation during planting to improve emergence and yield.
Photo by Phyllis Coulter
PHYLLIS COULTER
FarmWeek
Jeremy Hodel is so proud of the new product he helped develop that he has a photograph of a healthy field where it was successfully used on his mantle at home, right next to his wedding photo.
The product manager of PTx, the technology division of AGCO, shared his excitement about his work with ArrowTube at the Winter Conference in Tremont, which showcased research and products from Precision Planting and PTx Trimble in mid-January.
ArrowTube is a seed delivery system that provides accurate spacing while planting at high speed. It orients corn seeds with the tip down to promote even germination and emergence. It also orients the embryo sideways to promote corn leaves that grow across the row to capture maximum sunlight.
“They said it couldn’t be done,” Hodel said of the project, which involved four years of tedious research. At first, researchers placed individual seeds in the soil to study the impact of seed orientation before engineering equipment to control it.
Even though it won’t be commercially available for farmers this spring, it has been successfully tested on 3,000 acres in four states. Researchers used 75 hybrids of different brands, shapes, sizes and crops to test their success with even emergence leading to higher yields.
It will be available this fall so farmers can use it for planting in 2027.
New weed management options
Farmers are already using SymphonyVision on their sprayers to spot select weeds to control them with contact herbicide.
By using SymphonyVision to map weed density, researchers were also able to find and address other weed problems. “It gives us a weed severity map,” said Tristan Herrmann, PTx product manager. Using the mapping tool in 80 fields, they found hot spots of weeds are most often at the field edge. “There are three times more weeds than the rest of the field,” he said.
Uncontrolled edge-of-field weeds can go to seed, creating a bigger weed seedbank and more weeds throughout the field. A new sprayer attachment, SmokeRow, adds two nozzles at the end of the boom that spray beyond the boom, controlling weeds in field edges, near waterways and terraces.
SmokeRow pulls chemical from a secondary solution tank, allowing a different tank mix to be sprayed through the SmokeRow nozzles than the rest of the field, he said.
Researchers’ next challenge was to figure out how to both spot-spray weeds and broadcast residuals at the same time to cut down a pass and reduce costs and compaction.
The new retrofit sprayer system, SymphonyVision/Duo, allows farmers to spray residuals that have less herbicide resistance to get smaller and less intensive weeds, simultaneously spot-spraying the larger and more intensive weeds with a contact herbicide.
Autonomous assistance
Josh Murman wants to make the most of his time while helping on the family farm in Nebraska, so he can get back to his day job as a PTx autonomous systems engineer. Part of how his family manages that is with the PTx Trimble OutRun platform to get several tasks done at once.
Since the fall window for harvest and tillage is so small and labor at most farms is so tight, autonomous grain cart and tillage operations using OutRun can help free up farmers to run the combine, drill wheat, tend to livestock or attend to other family needs.
