Multiple resources are available to help farmers, a Case IH rep said
With the spring planting season approaching, it’s a good time to review planter maintenance tips to ensure everything is ready to roll for 2025.
One thing growers should keep in mind, according to Dave Brennan, a planter marketing manager with Case IH, is today’s planters are more sophisticated than those of the past.
But multiple resources are available to make the process go smoothly.
“It can be overwhelming because planters as we know them today are no longer the four-row planters of yesteryear,” he told Farms.com. “You can always start with your local dealer and the inspection program they have in place. We also have productivity guides, our YouTube channel has bite-sized videos of how to make some adjustments, and then of course there’s the operators manual.”
Brennan estimates farmers can do a fairly thorough planter inspection within a few hours.
When conducting spring planter maintenance, producers need to ask themselves what they’re going to replace.
Growers should assess their planting needs and the equipment condition when making this call, Brennan said.
“Our recommended measurement of replacement for disc openers is 14.5 inches,” he said. “If I’ve got some that are 14 and ¾, but if I’m facing 2,000 acres of corn to plant, I probably should replace them.”
Thinking about these decisions from an agronomic standpoint can help.
This means looking at how worn disc openers may affect seed placement, or if a worn furrow forming point is going to be achieving flat bottom seed trenches, Brennan said.
Looking at the seed itself can also lend itself to better planter success in the spring.
If a producer is planting a new variety or a new crop altogether, the planter must be set up properly to support the crop’s success.
The operator’s manual will provide baseline information for setting the meters, but growers can take those steps further if they wish.
“You can bring a sample of seed into a local dealer, take a meter in and they can dial it in for you in a MeterMax stand,” Brennan said. “You can also take your planter and run it a simulated ground speed mode.”
This mode helps with stationary testing.
To access this, farmers go into their speed setting window. Select manual input and set the proper speed.
“The planter will sit there with all subsystems running as if it’s planting the seed into the ground,” Brennan said, adding that a producer may want to place buckets down to capture the seed from the planter.
Inside the cab, farmers can see all the meter metrics on the display, and make some settings adjustments.
One overlooked piece of spring planter maintenance in Brennan’s view is the bulk fill seed delivery system.
Planters use such a volume of air to blow the seed out to the row units, and that can lead to lots of dust and debris.
“Cleaning out that bulk fill fan inductor area is commonly overlooked, and the end result when we visit with customers later in the year is they had trouble getting seed out to certain rows,” Brennan said. “Taking the time to clean it out once a year is probably fine.”