Calibrate Your Grain Drill for Cover Crops in 15 Minutes

0:00 Morning. This is Zach with Green Cover coming at you from my field this morning. We're planting some spring forages. I have my Green Cover High Viz shirt because farm safety is no accident. I want to show you this morning about how to calibrate a grain drill when you're doing a cover crop mix, a specialty for it, a monoculture something, and just easy way to do that with household items. So, I've got three things that I need this morning.

0:24 Ziploc bags, my wife's kitchen scale that measures in grams, and two preset zip ties. So, let's go around here and we'll show you how we get started with this. So, what we do, I've already started some of this, but we take a seed tube off and take our Ziploc bag, poke it through one of these preset zip ties, bend it around, right on there so that it stays. What we're going to do is we're going to do one of those on

0:56 Both sides because a box drill has two different levers. As you can see, this one's only 15 foot, but it has two levers as well. And what we're going to do is we're going to come up to our tractor and we're going to measure out 150 ft, which is not super far. We're going to put our hat down, put your roll of paper towels, whatever it may be, and that's going to mark your front tire. So, mark it off your front tire, your tractor. And just a pro tip, go ahead.

1:21 And mark the front tire of your tractor as well. So when you go down and need to come back, you don't have to restep off 150 ft. But let's do that and let's see what we come up with. Okay. Start up the tractor. Come off the front wheel.

1:35 Always make sure you're out past your drill. Just toss down your marker so that so you don't run over it.

1:44 All right. So I got my 50 steps, 150 ft for my tractor. So, now we're going to go get in that tractor and drive down.

1:50 One thing to remember before you put your Ziploc baggies on your drill, let it down and drive just a little ways to fill your meter up. Cuz if you don't, your calibration here in your 150 ft of actual planning will be blank or skewed just a little bit because there won't be any seed in those meters yet.

2:09 All right, so coming up on our marker here, we get the next to the tire. We're going

2:15 To go ahead and stop this point. Raise the increment up and go check and see what we got.

2:24 All right, as we can see, got a little bit of seed in there. Let's go ahead and pull this off on this side. Grab this one as well.

2:34 With those zip ties, don't make them too tight so you can slide them on and off so you can keep reusing them.

2:40 Also, when you're taking those bags off, try to keep them either in your hands so

2:44 You know which side of the drill they're on because more than likely one side's going to be seating a little bit heavier than the other.

2:51 All right, we're back in the tractor because it's a little bit windy today. You can see I got my wife's kitchen scale set on grams. The Ziploc baggie of seed. We're going to set it on there. See our readout. So, our left side of our drill is 15 g.

3:07 Right side out of our drill. 17 grams.

3:36 Clover into an alpha alpha stand. So we're trying to get to a pretty low seating rate. So I'm going to cut my drill back a little bit more on my levers. Already set it for what the drill box had told me I needed it for. But like normal, it's about 30% high. So I'm going to repeat this process. Raise it up. Turn around. Since I marked the other end, I don't have to measure again. And just go ahead and collect this until I get my drill seated just.

3:58 Right. All right. We just did another test run here. Let's grab our seed bags from both sides. So, this slips off. Use the same zip ties so I don't have to waste those. All right, we're back to our scale here. Drop those on. 9 g. That's 7 g on the left, 10 g on the right. So, you can see I still got that right side just a little bit heavy. So, let's check our seating rate and see what we come up with.

4:26 Right. So, that seating rate runs me about 7, 7, and 12 lbs an acre at the 7 G. So, I'm going to tweak that other side down just a little bit more. Maybe another tick on the lever there. And I'm going to go ahead and run. I do want to point something out. So, these box drills, it seems like a lot of times we can't get the seating rate set accurately or people say that they really won't cut down low enough, but that's putting on 7 lbs an acre of this.

4:49 Frosty Versam clover, which is a very, very low rate. So it's got very minimal room for error. So we really want to make sure we're getting it set right. I do this as well with all my cover crop mixes. You know, it takes me less than 15 minutes once I get this process set up.

5:04 And my final piece of advice when calibrating your grain drill. Some of you may notice I'm in a different part of the field. Don't forget to hook your seed tubes back up before you get started, because if you don't, you'll stop on the other side of the field to fix it.

5:18 That's all I have for you today. I hope this has helped somebody out. And don't forget, let green pepper help keep you covered.