AFTER travelling to the Yorke Peninsula to speak with members of the YP Alkaline Soils Group and visiting farmers at Bute, South Australia and across the region, Avon district farmer Ben Pym found K-Hart seeders were handling similar conditions to his own country with ease and efficiency.
Mr Pym said he chose the model because it had been proven in South Australia, especially in handling rocky country and sandy soils.
He found the K-Hart could easily cut through stubble and not hair-pin.
His machine has flat Shearer discs to deal with stones, and is fitted with K-Hart presswheels.
The discs minimise soil disturbance and sow at nine centimetres deep.
He said front coulters throw soil out of the way, while rear discs sow the seed.
“The discs handle rocks better by pushing them in the ground, not pulling them up annually,” he said.
“We are now in our fifth season using the seeder and it’s definitely a machine that doesn’t dig too many stones, which is important for us with limestone reefs.”
He said the discs sliced through the soil, just like a knife through butter.
Disc seeders are often more popular than some knife-point seeders because they can operate up to two times as fast and cause less soil disturbance, reducing soil moisture loss and weed germination.
But a lack of soil disturbance with some disc seeders can reduce the effectiveness of soil-applied herbicides, as they require some soil cover to prevent their active ingredients from evaporating.
In the case of the K-Hart seeder, which throws relatively more soil than other disc seeders, weed control is enhanced when using soil-applied herbicides and less herbicide-induced crop damage is apparent.
The disc seeder has also been shown to be faster than direct drill, increasing sowing speeds from eight to 10 kilometres an hour to about 12-16km/hr.
Mr Pym said the K-Hart had reduced downtime at seeding, increased the overall work rate with faster travel speed, and reduced the amount of stone brought to the surface.
His seeder incorporates a coulter out the front and double-disc opener, which he says prevents chemicals from getting back into the sowing path.
On his set-up, coulter-induced soil throw occurs simultaneously on a single run, which removes the risk of soil reaching adjacent seed rows and results in an effective incorporation and concentration of herbicide in the inter-row.
Mr Pym said the K-Hart’s flexibility in row spacing was also advantageous.
“We are using 285 millimetres. We wanted a 10-metre machine to work with our 20m boom spray and at the same time, made the jump into guidance.”
Before switching over to the K-Hart, the Pym family’s AFM cultivator was set to 180mm with finger tyne harrows.
“We have had very little teething problems since buying the seeder.”
