Reducing Pinch Row Compaction: Will it make a difference?
9 Jul 242m 26s

Farmers often find themselves working in conditions that aren't ideal, facing challenges such as wet ground beneath dry surfaces and the heavy weight of modern planters causing pinch row issues. Pinch rows occur when planter tires create sidewall compaction, reducing crop yield significantly. Temple Rhodes says it has been a massive issue for him on his farm. Let's see if the Fendt Momentum lives up to it's claim of a 5-7 bushel increase?

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00:00 A lot of times we're out here when we really shouldn't be. That's like the, that's what US farmers do. 00:05 Ground is dry right now, but if you peel back this ground underneath, it's wet. And with our planters nowadays being so heavy, 00:12 we're having this pinch row issue. And when I talk about pinch rows, I'm talking about we're the tires 00:17 and the planters run, you know, you're putting sidewall compaction on those other rows and we've seen, like in through the field, 00:24 you can actually see right where the tractor runs. And we've had massive issues with that. You know, the bigger the planters get, 00:30 the more we get stressed out, the more we kind of push limits. And now you're telling me 00:34 that you've got something that'll help me with that. Yeah. So we've got load logic on this planter. 00:39 So we've got a combination of a couple things. So we've got the tire inflation system that as soon as you open the planter up, it's gonna go into plant mode 00:45 and it's gonna deflate the tires down to 15 PSI. And then inside the spindles on the wheels, there's a smart hub in there 00:51 that's gonna take a weight measurement and that's gonna tell the computer on the planter how to disperse the weight evenly across the, 00:57 the whole main frame of there. So your footprint is literally on this planter, it's 40 feet wide. 01:02 So instead of just having everything on a pinch row, we're spread that out. So deflating the tires on there, we're expanding 01:07 that footprint of that tire. So we're able to carry that weight up front away from the rows and not have that pinch row. 01:13 Yeah. See we, I mean like where we run our planters, you'll see like a real defined mark exactly where each tire track went. 01:21 We actually have to set our planters differently on the center section than what I did on this planter. I set every row basically exactly the same. 01:28 And on my other planters, I don't get to do that wherever there's a tire, I'm sitting at a half a hole deeper 01:34 and I run into these problems all the time. Yep. So it's kind of one of these things that, you know, small things, it goes a long way 01:41 and you don't realize how much yield you're actually robbing from yourself. Yeah. We're seeing anywhere from five 01:47 to seven bushel difference on, on those pinch rows. So if you take that across the, an operation of, you know, three, four, 5,000 acres, it adds up. Farmers 01:55 Get to the point, you get backed in the corner and you push yourself and we'll go out there and run a vertical tillage tool on over to top the ground 02:02 and all of a sudden it becomes dry. That's exactly what I did yesterday, by the way. I was really, shouldn't have been out here, 02:07 but I was out here anyway because we, I mean, it's middle of May. Sure. We're getting behind. We got a rain coming 02:12 and we push the limits. I know I'm gonna have pinch rows. I'm hoping that I can show that I don't have it on this one. 02:18 We're confident that you won't have that on here. Alright. I.

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