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Core Services and Capabilities
Versatile Precision
Plot Planter
Fertilizers, Additives, and Crop Protection
Commercial Equipment for Field-Scale Trials
The most critical piece of euipment for successful farming and field trial research is the planter. We have invested in a totally custom 4-row planter built by Planters Precision and featuring components supplied by Precision Planting. The planter is equipped with Cornerstone row units, hydraulic downforce, variable rate electric drive vacuum meters, center and sideband in-furrow fertilizer application, dual band CoNceal nitrogen placement, belt-drive seed tubes, and a pneumatic closing system. The components work in concert to deliver incredibly consistent seed placement, spacing, and emergence with dozens of options for placement of fertilizer and additives.
Our Facilities and Land
The research farm consists of 155 acres in south-central Illinois, located about 90 miles east of St. Louis on I-70, near Effingham IL. Soils are flat, uniform, and moderate-high productivivity Cisne-Hoyleton-Newberry silt loams with 2% organic matter and pH ranging from 6.0-7.0. The cropping system is rainfed and features a corn-soy-wheat rotation, allowing land to be rotated out of research for 2 years between trials to eliminate residual treatment artifacts. The owners have extensive experience with regenerative cover cropping practices and various tillage systems.
Our specialized expertise is in soil fertility and fertilzer additives. We have custom-built equipment to enable the full array of fertilizer placement options for both liquid and dry sources. Whether you seek placement options for In-furrow, side-furrow, shallow band, deep band, side-dress, dribble band, surface broadcast, or broadcast with incorportation, we have your needs covered. We can provide a diverse selection of in-season soil, root, tissue, microbial, and biomass measurements, in addition to sophisticated high resolution multi-spectral imagery - all to help you craft a complete picture of product performance.
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We also offer a full range of crop protection products efficacy research, with in-season assessments of crop injury ratings, weed control scores by species, and disease ratings. Crop protection products are applied with a hand boom spray system for research-grade small plot precision. We also have options for aerial drone application on field-scale plots. If you need something else that you don't see listed, we are always happy to learn more about your needs and find creative ways to deliver the service you require.
Ag research is quickly evolving toward commercially relevant field-scale trials in collaboration with farmers. We are farmers and operate a relatively modern commercial-scale fleet of equipment, including a GPS-enabled variable rate John Deere 1790 16/32 twin-row vacuum planter with twin seed hoppers to enable 8-row field-scale split plots, under vertical tillage, no till, and strip till. We harvest with a John Deere S670 featuring a calibrated GPS-enabled yield monitor with all loads weighed via grain cart scales. All data is automatically moved to the cloud via John Deere Operations Center to enable rapid data sharing. We operate a portfolio of land, and have deep community connections that afford us access to progressive growers and additional land. And we maintain strong relationships with local ag retail for a number of custom operations. We can confidently facilitate a wide range of field-scale trials.