Bertini's in Action

Puken Alvares lives south of Rosario and due West of Buenos Aires so we set off early in the morning and went to see a number of the model 32 seeders in action on his farm. The sowing width was just over 8 metres with a seed and fertiliser box along the entire width of the machine. This would mean that for us going from a 2 compartment airseeder box which is filled from one location to needing a movable auger and truck system for loading the combine.

Filling Seeder

When viewing the machine in action it had particularly good cutting (although a bit aggressive) by the coulter through a thick corn residue with a very even sowing depth and distance between seeds. The large wavy coulter was being used and on the soft sandy soils in that area there was too much soil throw.

Definite Path to Show Some Disturbance (No Trick Photography)

Seeder With Marker Arms

The machine has an ideal length and also had a tow hitch on the end to drop the transport width down to 3.5 m. With the assemblies fully lifted it gave an excellent high clearance for transport.

High Lift for Transport

 Farm Manager, Enrico Bertini, Puken Alvares, Me (No Name to Balance Manager) 

The contractors gave the machines a good recommendation particularly in the area of low maintenance. Their rotation that we saw was corn corn legume legume winter cereal winter cereal. This type of rotation is known as a double stacked rotation. The two corns give a very good control of weeds and produce an excellent amount of biomass. It was good to see the drills in action and it gave me a good idea of what Enrique and Luis had been talking about. We made our way home late at night but the time passed quickly as we had some good discussions regarding disc drill setups.

One area of debate is the setting of the front coulter as to whether it should be set deeper than the double disc seeder unit or if it should be set shallower. As the double disc has the depth control wheels attached I feel that the front coulter should be set 5 – 10 mm shallower than the double seeding discs.