Dad and I spent some time this morning working up our yearly chart that will come along for the ride in the planter tractor. This chart is a baseline for certain settings on the planter than need to be changed in relation to seed size. Sizing corn and soybean seed is an important step in being prepared when conditions are right for planting.
The first thing you may notice is the chart isn’t quite complete. I guess it doesn’t really need to be since it makes sense to us. Also plans will change when seed actually hits the soil, and we don’t have all our seed yet. The Vac setting is the amount of vacuum our planter should be pulling on the seed plates relative to seed size and type of plant. That information comes first from the seed size printed on each bag or container of seed which correlates to a rate chart in the owner’s manual from our planter. When we hit the fields we will stop the planter occasionally to dig up seed to take physical counts of population per acre and tweak settings from that point.
The column for relatively maturity indicates the time it takes for a corn plant to reach maturity. It’s really a kind of silly system in that there is no standardization across brands in either the numbers or the definition, but everyone uses it.
All seed has a lot of good information printed on the tag. All seed products should have this information. So whether you are sowing grass in your lawn, planting a garden, or tending thousands of acres you would do yourself a favor to be familiar with the tag on the bag.
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