No till farming

Calibrating Your Spreader or Drill For Seed Installation

The easiest method to calibrate your spreader or drill is to convert weight per acre to volume per acre then spread the seeds over a measured area to determine the rate of output. It is much easier to measure volume in the field than weight.

To convert weight per acre to volume, get the Bulk lbs/Acre from your seed tag and divide by the bulk density listed.

Convert to Weight by Volume

If your bulk lbs per acre is 9lbs and the bulk density of the mix is 1.5 lbs/gallon: 9lbs \ 1.5 lbs per gallon = 6 Gallons per acre.

The next step is to determine the width of your spread or no till drill.

With a broadcast spreader, put some seed in the spreader and run at the speed you will be running for 15 to 20 feet and then stop and measure the width of spread. A drill will just be the width of the implement’s openers. (These are the disk that open the furrow to drop the seed into the soil)

To determine how far you need to travel to cover an acre divide 43,560 ( square feet in an acre ) by the spread width.

Example:  If your spread width is 8 feet
43,560/8 ft spread width = 5445 feet traveled to cover 1 acre. 0.1 acre would be traveling 545 feet for initial calibration

Use a GPS App for measuring distance

The easiest method to measure distance is a GPS  app on your phone or a hand held GPS.

Our recommended list of GPS APPS are:

• GPS Fields Area Measure – Measure Field area and perimeter
• GPS Map Ruler – Distance Measure & Area Measure

But a measuring wheel works as well.

It generally takes 2 or 3 tenth of an acre calibration runs to get set and then we would recommend a double check on the first full acre for fine tuning.

We generally calibrate to a little bit less than the full rate and then go over priority areas a second time to run out all of the seed.