When it comes to planting, most farmers have a few dozen times in their career to get it right. Planter performance is especially important for no-tillers and strip-tillers dealing with tough field conditions.

Most of them care far more than what ‘color’ the machine is. They want to know which planter is best at moving residue, singulating and depositing seed and closing the seed trench.

Researchers for the Practical Farm Research program at Beck’s Hybrids have been doing research on planter attachments for years and reporting on the results. But this year they launched an ambitious plan to put entire planter setups head-to-head on various performance measures. Case IH, John Deere and Fendt participated.

Beck’s workers spent countless hours working with company reps, crouching in the dirt to measure seed spacing, planting flags after emergence and more. 

Logging the spacing results was especially trying, as researchers were on their hands and knees for days using digital calipers doing true-plant counts in dozens of different spots throughout the fields. They dug up every place where they saw an apparent skip and if the seed simply didn’t germinate it…