Back to Basics: Preseason Planter Maintenance Tips You Can Do Now
February 4, 2020 My childhood was pretty great. I was born in the ’70s and grew up in the ’80s. Sure, I had Nancy Reagan telling me to “Just say no” and Nike ads telling me to “Just do it”, which may have been a contributing factor to my indecisiveness today. But I had no social media to contend with and Ronald Reagan protected me from the Russians while mom and dad protected me from everything else. Like I said, it was pretty great.
I was also economically oblivious as a child. Open doors in the winter (with my dad screaming “what are you trying to do? Heat the whole neighborhood?) and leaving the lights on in the house and barns. I would let the hot shower run for 20 minutes before I even got into the bathroom. And let my vehicle idle for no good reason at all. It meant nothing to me as I wasn’t the one paying the bills.
Until you are the one writing the check you don’t fully appreciate how pennies add up to dollars and dollars make the bottom line. Once you gain this appreciation you look for little things that are easy to control to put the money back in your pocket.
The same is true for your corn and bean planter. With Mother Nature proceeding to take all of us to the whipping post the last 18 months, it’s time to get back to basics and get total control of things we have the power to influence.
Let’s talk simple planter maintenance. You might pull a few disk openers and measure their diameter. If they are more than 14.5” you would usually say “good enough” and put them back on. But what if you hit a few rocks last season and bent those openers a bit. What if they aren’t giving you a “True V” opening?
How about your gauge wheels? Are they set right? Did you do a depth check in your shop or do you assume that when all rows are set to the same “T” handle setting that all rows are planting the same depth? Are you sure that your row cleaners are throwing the trash far enough away so it doesn’t impact the planting depth of the gauge wheels?
Are you running a motor on your hex shaft in the shop to check for worn bearings, bad chains and sprockets, and anything else that can go wrong on that mechanical setup? Why wait until you are putting seed in the ground to check these items when most of it can be done now in your shop.
After last year’s spring I know that corn and bean farmers are chomping at the bit to get an early start to planting. Temperature be damned! If it’s fit the planters will row. If you have that sense of urgency then I cannot stress enough to check these items this winter rather than while the planter is running.
Simple things like disk opener calibration. Consistent depth settings, gauge wheel calibration, bushings, bearings, chains, and everything else that makes your planter do what it does. These things are the farming equivalent to turning off the lights, turning down the thermostat, and keeping the doors shut. And for god sakes get in and out of the shower quickly so you don’t waste hot water.
It’s easy to control these things. It’s not terribly expensive to control these things. But these items can have a huge impact on your emergence and bottom line yield.
And just so you know I’ve been blessed with the most perfect daughter of all time, well, at least the best kid I’ve ever had. She’s a spitting image of her father and grandfather. Strong, stubborn, sharp like a tack and quick witted. And guess what I spend most of my adult life doing? Turning off all the lights in the house, shutting the doors and windows, yelling at her to get the hell out of the shower after a half hour. She spends more time singing in the shower than she does actually getting clean. Hopefully one day she will appreciate the little things that save pennies which eventually lead to dollars.
And I hope one day she has a kid that acts exactly like her!
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