With the Proceed, Väderstad is setting the tone in seeding technology. Due to be unveiled at Agritechnica, the new drill combines the accuracy of precision planting with the reduced establishment costs of no-till for a broad range of crops
Would you like to run just the one drill that can be used to plant everything, from sugar beet to maize, to cereals? And what if each coulter was carried on a parallelogram for consistent depth control, featured precise seed singling and could also put fertiliser down the spout … all in one pass?
Väderstad is well on the way to offering such a drill, and we were able to catch up with one of the prototype concepts this autumn. It is still at least two years away from going on sale, but here’s a brief outline of what it has to offer.
Many of the main components have already appeared on other Väderstad machines. For instance, the 3,000-litre pressurised hopper is the same unit as used on the Central Fill Tempo we looked at in the last issue of profi. The seeder units are also borrowed from the Tempo, but these are now spread across two rows to give the closer row spacing demanded by cereal growers.
Two rows of coulters
The featured test machine had 24 coulters staggered across two rows. Spaced at 45cm, they achieve a working width of 5.40m on a 22.5cm row spacing. This may seem wide compared to more conventional cereal drills, but, in view of upcoming challenges in terms of weed control, this may be a sustainable compromise. Less of an issue is the narrower plant spacing within the row: with a reduced rate of 120 seeds/m² and a 22.5cm row width, for example, the 3.6cm plant spacing is even wider than if drilling at a rate of 400 seeds/m² with a 12.5cm row spacing.
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