Which Bushing kits are best for your JD 50/60/90 series drill?
Because there are several bushing kit options marketed, we field this question often, “Which bushing kit is the best fit for me, and why?” Of course, we should factor time (of the repair/job and maintenance), price and quality. Exapta delivers quality—with every...
Reduce overlap. Decrease input costs.
In today’s competitive and uncertain market, maximizing margins is vital to improving your profit potential. With so many factors affecting your yields, you can’t always control what you get out of every acre. But you can control what you put in. Have you ever...
Plant with Assurance
Many have fall crops to harvest yet and some are still fighting the mud to wrap up fall seeding. We are facing one of the wettest fall seasons in recent history. We, at Exapta, feel your pain—we have our own crops to get in and out of the fields. Precipitation not...
STP ‘saw-tooth’ opener blades
by Matt Hagny The Exapta crew has gotten quite a few questions from our customers as to Precision Tillage Tech’s STP/Sabre-Tooth opener blades, so we tested them this spring [2019] on a JD 1770 planter with XP row units in central Kansas in 25-year no-till on mellow...
Introducing Exapta’s weight brackets for JD 3-section air drills
Many of you in North America are fighting mud, and might find it difficult to contemplate needing more frame weight at the moment. But we’ve been down this road before—when it stops raining and gets sunny & hot, the soil goes from too soft to too hard in a matter...
Frame bolt breakage on JD air drills
If you have a JD drill where the rear transport wheel frame is held together as shown in the photo, you probably are constantly replacing broken bolts. We’ve found that using a pair of shorter bolts instead of a single long bolt in those spots pretty much eliminates...
Do seed-applied fungicides harm mycorrhizae?
by Matt Hagny It seems to be the latest trend amongst the Regenerative Ag folks to stop using seed-applied fungicides for fear of what they might be doing to the soil ecology, particularly mycorrhizae (see my previous newsletter on this —my agronomy consulting is dba...
Paying attention pays off!
This no-till cotton field was planted with 2 different planters, 2 operators. The arrow is the dividing line. The planters were both equipped with Keetons + Mojos, new opener blades, etc. The one on the RH side had Thompson closing wheels with toe-out wedges, the...
Soybean Stand Uniformity: Does It Matter?
by Matt Hagny Soybeans into cc oats in central KS, seeded with a JD 1560 drill with upgraded seed boots (90-series), SDX firming wheels, Thompson closing wheels. We tend to be rather complacent about soybean stand uniformity—non-uniform distance between plants as well...
Planter Downforce, Depth Settings, and Levelness
by Matt Hagny If you have new blades on a Deere planter with the depth mechanism set as shown in this photo, the furrow being cut should be 2” deep consistently. If it’s less than that, you don’t have enough downforce on the row unit. (For corn, sunflowers, and...