old iron

 picked up this planter for $500 from a dairy farmer who closed his place.  It's a john deere model 7000 planter.  Here I've got Garret and Sean working on it.  Seed is expensive, so what's going on is that we're putting a little bit of seed into the planter and making sure that it's being delivered at the spacing that we want, and that all of the parts work.

This isn't the latest-and-greatest planter; but it's mostly functional.  Pressure wash it to get the grime off of it for easier inspection.    Grease for all the parts that spin, chain inspection, replace a couple of belts for $12.50 each and order a couple of bin lids (I'm guessing they blew off at some point ) and then put a little bit of feed into it, and roll it back and forth on the concrete pad, watching the seeds fall.

Seed corn sells for $4/lb, and if this thing doesn't work correctly it'll waste hundreds of dollars, so this is actually a pretty important activity.  Worth spending half a day to get it right.  I notice that the corn meters (the part that actually grabs each seed) isn't as accurate as it could be.  So off to the manual I go for the cleaning and tuning instructions.

The bins are fiberglass, and I'm getting itchy working around them.  I make a note that I need to paint them to keep the fibres in place, and I'll probably need to replace one of them.  I keep a list of maintenance for each piece of equipment, and that's a rainy day activity.  I'll order the parts so that I can do the repair as time allows.  

This particular planter is set up for dry fertilizer (the two larger bins on the tractor side). I'll skip that for now; I've put lots of manure tea from the manure lagoon on the land I'm planting, and I think it'll be good for this planting.

This JD 7000 can plant beans (soybean and edible), corn, probably pumpkin (although it's not listed, the seeds are the right size and shape and a lot of people are still using it.  More modern variants of seeders can be amazingly large.

It's the same basic unit; each row gets its own planter, there's just quite a few more rows.  With that sort of setup you can plant an acre in a few minutes, and they do.  With a four-row planter you're probably talking about 30 minutes per acre at roughly 30,000 corn plants per acre population.