The metering and the seed placement has been a game changer. You’ve got that singulation across the whole drill. You don’t have to worry about putting too much product on one end or anything. Every shank is getting the exact same treatment. We still think it’s the best-designed opener for the country that we live in. We’ve got some rolling hills and that seed placement, we’ve maintained that uniform depth. We have the packing pressure to make a nice seed bed and the support has been really good. We do run a phosphorus liquid kit with our seeders as well and the kit works seamlessly with the setup. I would say in the last 10 years, SeedMaster probably dominates the market in this area now.
We’ve been trying to seed between the rows with our 12-inch seeders before, so we thought that the 15 would be that much more efficient for getting that new seed furrow into fresh soil so with the extra spacing there, that worked really well. We had hailed out conditions that we seeded into this spring from last year. We don’t own a heavy harrow and never harrowed or did anything to that durum stubble that was all laid over from the hail. With the 15-inch, with the residue management wheels and everything on the Ultra SR, we were able to cut it at a bit of an angle and allow the straw to walk through. It didn’t look perfect, but everything came up perfect. So it worked out real well for that.
The upgrades to the residue management wheels for the 2024 models were the main reason why we bought them. I think that being able to lock those wheels up higher from penetrating the ground so much is going to make a big difference on the straw clearance as well as the wear on the machine. The new splits on the tanks [as compared to a traditional air cart] make it much more efficient. We don’t have as much wasted space as the old design.
We ordered the drills in the summer expecting to see them for spring 2024, and they showed up mid-harvest, so that surprised us. They were there very early!
We have a pretty good relationship with Adam who’s the rep for this area. With the last seeder he was readily available with any questions or anything we had and if he didn’t know the answer, he definitely found out from someone who did. Basically, just looking at the updates on social media and looking at the new machine designs at a couple of the shows, we kind of figured that’s the way we wanted to go.
Matthew Carles, Mattlee Joint Ventures
Radville, SK
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