Your air seeder only allows you to choose one downforce setting, meaning that you can’t match it to every environment in your field. SeederForce is an automated downforce control system that measures and adjusts downforce every time you encounter variability in the field, to ensure that you have a consistent crop stand that provides great yields.

Manual Down Force Adjustments Don’t Cut It

When seeding, it is painful to see some seeds on top of the ground, prompting you to need to increase down pressure, or in some cases, add suitcase weights. The problem is that before you got out of the cab and checked, you didn’t know that the downforce was set incorrectly. Your goal is to get each seed into moisture so it will grow, but not to have so much downforce that the gauge wheel of the row unit is creating compaction that won’t allow the plants to have a good root system. With a single downforce setting across the entire drill, it is challenging to get this correct.

Identifying The Problem

Precision Planting saw this as an issue as we worked with growers in the plains, and has spent years digging into the issue of downforce settings on seeders and doing testing and development in those states. The result is SeederForce, an automated downforce control system that can be added to your seeder or drill to give you control of downforce and to prevent seeds on top of the ground, and eliminate sidewall compaction.

Measurements Lead to Adjustments

SeederForce uses load cells on the row units of the drill to measure how much weight is on the gauge wheel. By maintaining a consistent amount of weight on the gauge wheel, you can be confident that you are placing seeds at seeding depth because, in order to have weight on the gauge wheel, the disk opener has to first be creating a seed trench at the depth that it is set. From the cab of the tractor on the 20|20 display, the operator selects how much gauge wheel weight they want to have on the wheels of the drill and the SeederForce system makes automatic adjustments from there to maintain the desired weight.

Choose Section or Row-by-Row Control

SeederForce Section control varies the downforce applied to each rockshaft of the drill. Each section has a few load cells on it and the downforce is adjusted based on the average of these load cells. If one section of the drill is behind the tractor and needs more force to penetrate through tracks, it gets that weight without the wing sections having to have more force applied to them.