Kuhn Farm Machinery is launching a new six-metre minimum tillage drill at next month’s Cereals event.
According to Kuhn, the new drill is capable of being pulled by a 200hp tractor and drilling accurately to forward working speeds of up to 17km per hour.
The company’s UK sales manager, Duncan McLeish, said: “Forward operating speed is a key priority when drilling, to ensure all crops are sown in a timely fashion while making the best use of optimum conditions.
“But this speed should never be at the expense of accuracy. Nor should it compromise overall operational efficiency, which means horsepower requirements should also be a consideration.”
He said the new ESPRO minimum tillage drill had two rows of 460mm concave discs for opening the soil, followed in the centre of the drill by a row of 900mm diameter press wheels to create an “evenly consolidated soil profile for consistent soil-to-seed contact”.
Kuhn said the large diameter of the press wheel would help reduce the overall rolling resistance of the drill, while the deep-treaded tyres would augment improve soil crumbling for a finer tilth.
“Further innovation comes with the Crossflex seed bar, which has coulter arms mounted on polyurethane blocks that provide a secure fixing but with sufficient spring movement to maintain a precise seed depth at high working speeds,” added the manufacturer.
“Double disc coulters, as used on Kuhn’s successful Seeflex system, provide the precision seed placement required for optimum crop performance. The ESPRO is Isobus compatible and can be operated via Kuhn’s CCI200 (Isobus) or VT50 (non-Isobus) terminals. A joystick is also available as an option.”
The drill also features a headland management mode to allow the operator to lift the working elements in sequence on approaching the headland and subsequently allow drilling to continue right up to the field edge.
Kuhn claims that calibration is simple and can be completed in less than five minutes.
Mr McLeish said: “All in all, the ESPRO features all the elements required to enable time-critical seed drilling operations to be carried out quickly and accurately. And with a power requirement of less than 35hp per metre of working width, the ESPRO can be used with tractors with just 200hp, making it suited to the majority of modern farming businesses, as well as larger-scale arable contractors.”
He said the six-metre ESPRO 6000 R and a three-metre ESPRO 3000 version would be available in limited quantities from summer 2015. Other models and working widths will be launched in the coming years.