How To Calibrate A Grain Drill: Introduction

In this post, Dr. Gabe Kenne introduces a series that walks through farmer Jason Carter’s method to calibrate a grain drill for multi-species cover crops.

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When planting a single-species, grain drills have settings that will get you close to the desired pounds per acre. Carter has noticed that at times, one of the challenges for farmers planting multi-species cover crops is that their grain drills lack a setting to disperse multi-species seed.

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“When we plant a single species crop like weed or oats or rye, of course there's a setting on the drill and it has a pounds-per-acre to go by, and that will pretty much get you dialed in. And you could always double-check that by looking at the seed per foot, so you could just go over a certain distance and count your seed, and that's how we always checked our calibration over the years for a single species,” says Carter. “But of course when you go to a multi-species cover crop mix there's not anything on the chart because the mixes are going to vary, and you can't really count the seeds per pound per foot because it would just be such a hard equation to figure. So we had to come up with a method of weighing and calibrating the drill.”

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To watch the full "How To Calibrate A Grain Drill" Series CLICK HERE

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In the following blog installments, Carter will walk through his tools and tried-and-true method for calibrating a grain drill for multi-species cover crops.

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