Woods Precision Seeder (PSS84) first take

[Dukslayr]

A big shout out to Swampcat for helping me answer a lot of questions on the way to ultimately buying a Woods PSS84. I’ve gone around and around with what I wanted to buy for planting needs. I was leaning towards a GP 606NT to handle my planting needs, which are 14-15 acres of row crops, a couple miles of annual screens, some miller, and then various mixes and clover. I am moving up from planting 1 acre of food plots to nearly 20 acres, which I learned this year is a reasonably large undertaking, particularly if you’re short on time, live more then an hour away, don’t own the right equipment and the weather doesn’t cooperate. Fortunately I found a friendly local farmer to plant my 15 acres of row crops (9 beans and 6 sunflowers) for a very reasonable price. This farmer lives 2 miles away and has everything needed to handle my row crops quickly and easily. After my experience this year I decided to give it a few years before I invest in a high quality no till drill...see how the row crops hold up and what I future needs are after experimenting for a few years. In the meantime I’ll have access to someone who’s happy to do my custom planting.

That being said I still have a number or other smaller plots that need planting on my farm and a buddies and after a lot of research ended up with a Woods PSS84. Not knowing anything about farming I was curious how complicated it would be to figure out operate. Fortunately it’s actually straightforward and didn’t take long at all to figure out. I just planted an acre of white poroso millet as a test run and here are a few takeaways for anyone looking at this model.

1. It’s pretty big, heavy and I’m general appears to be very constructed. I’m glad I got the 8’ model as it covers the rear tracks of my 75 HP Massey.
2. Engaging and disengaging the seed boxes is a little more of a pain in the ass than I had hoped. You have to remove a number (6-7 I think) of plastic knobbed bolts to remove the guards and access the gears. Getting the gears disengaged is easy...just pull the pin. Reengaging is a little trickier because you’ve got to realign the gear with the hole on the shaft and then sneak the pins back in. I’m sure it’ll be easier the more I do it.
3. Calibrating for seed was surprisingly simple. In essence you open up the seed meter to what you guess is accurate for your seed size and rate, then crank a handle 11 times and measure what comes out and with a quick calculation you open or close the seed gate. Took about 10 minutes using the instructions the first time today. I think I’ll be able to get it calibrated for almost anything in about 5 minutes in the future.
4. With a little soil moisture I’m confident you could one pass plant most things in a field that’s been previously cultivated. The acre I planted was a fescue pasture/yard of an old farm house I recently removed. The ground has probably never been turned. I prepped the ground by mowing short, letting it sit a week and then making a pass over it with my tiller. It sat another week and I planted it today.
5. Seeder does a great job of metering seed, pulverizing and finishing a seed bed with the spiked roller and heavy cultipacker. For the small millet seed I chose to place it right in front of the cultipacker...most of the seed still got easily pushed into the dirt. See pictures below. By the time I planted the tilled ground was rock hard (not ideal but I’m out of time).

When I finished planting I had very little seed left, which was a good sign. The seeder seems to do a nice job at metering. I’m looking forward to trying some larger seeds and mixes too. Having two seed boxes will be very handy I think. Now I need some more of that rain that I couldn’t get to stop this spring...but as usual we can’t get a drop when we need it!

Few pictures below the grown up field before mowing and tilling it (didn’t kill it with any herbicides), the machine in action and a few of what it looked like post planting.

 

[cspot]

Nice! Would love to own a drill one of these days. How easy is it to adjust seeding depth?

 

[Dukslayr]

Nice! Would love to own a drill one of these days. How easy is it to adjust seeding depth?

I wouldn’t refer to this as a drill. This is definitely a seeder, which has some advantages over an actual drill and certainly some disadvantages too. Not sure how easy it is to get precision depth adjustments, just in general it should be fairly easy to get duffer t depths depending on which seed box you’re using and where you have the seed tubes dispersing the seed. For example you can have the small seed box drop seed in front of the spiked roller or behind it, directly in front of the cultipacker. Larger seed is dispensed behind the disc gang and in front of the spiked roller...you would adjust the depth of seed coverage for these seeds by changing the angle and depth of the disc gang...the more aggressive the angle and deeper the cut the deeper the is likely to be planted.

 

[SwampCat]

These seeders are in between a no-till drill and all the assorted single use planting equipment like disks, cultipackers, seed spreaders, etc. It has its advantages and disadvantages - but mostly advantages. You can not head out across a fescue pasture and expect a great seeding job like you could with a no-till drill. For larger seeds - planting depth is semi controlled by disk angle and tractor speed. You will see a small amount of seed on the ground - although it will be cultipacked.

The advantages are being able to plant two different sized seeds at the same time, at different depths, and different planting rates - for example - 100 lbs of wheat and 5 lbs of durana clover - with the wheat covered by soil and the clover surface planted and cultipacked. Another advantage compared to a drill is more even ground coverage. Your wheat doesnt end up just in rows 7 inches apart - it is more evenly spread across the soil. It is less likely to be damaged by subsurface roots or rocks. Our NRCS would not rent me their no-till drill for use in my food plots for fear of damage by tree roots. Basically, with the Woods - if you would pull a disk through it, you can use the Woods.

It is not a row crop planter. I have planted sunflowers in rows, but you have to tape up most of the seed holes in the bottom of the boxes and the rows are not that straight. It will not do a good job in unprepared cover. The vegetation needs to be removed or thinned. I dont pre till the ground. There is probably a slightly higher waste of ungerminated seed due to inconsistent planting depth when compared to a no till.

I average planting a acre per 20 minutes. The ground is disked a few inches - but no deep tilling, the seed is dropped, the spiked roller brakes up the bigger dirt clods, and it is lastly cultipacked - in one pass. I plant sixty acres per year with mine. It also probably does not require as good of pre-plant vegetation treatment as might be expected. Below is a pic of one pass soybean planting into last years johnson grass and browntop millet. To the right of the tractor is one pass.



Below is same field seven or eight days later