Variable-rate seeding is a relatively new practice that is fairly easy to adopt with today’s precision farming technology.

If you already have a yield monitor and/or auto-steering system, it may be reasonable to buy a variable-rate drive and control for your planter so you can begin to adjust seed populations on the go.

With seed costs escalating and erratic weather conditions to consider, we can’t afford to overseed field areas with low moisture-holding capacity.

And with high commodity prices, we can’t afford to underseed high-producing areas of the field, either.

Being able to change the seeding rate on the fly, based on soil production and moisture capacity, is crucial to improving overall profitability.

Know Your Populations

 Even though you may purchase a variable-rate drive to do variable-rate applications, you will likely need to use this variable-rate drive to research different seeding rates on your farm before you actually go to variable-rate seeding.

This drive will allow you to easily change populations, (without having to change sprockets) to put in different seeding rates and evaluate those seeding rates against your traditional seeding rate.

It’s important to know how to set your variable-rate populations for different areas of the field so you can decide what populations should be used.

To do this, purchase the technology and experiment with it, rather than waiting for someone to perfect the process of writing prescriptions for your field.

Do The Math

Set up your planter so you can plant with your normal fixed-rate population on one…