Great Plains. I have used Hay Buster a few times, but they break and don't have front colters before openers. I have a Great Plains NT606 (all I could afford) dirll with small seed option, just used it to do 30 acres using Bahia seed and brown top millet. The dirlls are pretty much the same design for 6ft to I think 13ft wide.

The great plains has alot of features, and adjustment to taylor the dirll to the seed and conditions your using and in. I really love the calabartion feature, lets you calabrate the drill for how many lbs per acre of seed before you ever go to feild. Takes all the guess work out of it. Anyway, I like it, pricey new, and hard to find used, was for me anyway, but works for me. I spent all day driving over to Tupelo MS to get mine, closest one I could find.

 

Here is a list of SWCD locations by county in TN that rent these drills...

http://www.tn.gov/twra/pdfs/tngrassdrills.pdf

John

 

The Great Plains have big, easily accessible boxes. They are easy to set up. ...etc, BUT, if you plan on no filling into corn stalks or other trashy crop I wish you the best of luck. Plug does not begin to describe it, trash will not flow through just push.... its gotta be JD if you want to no till. Bring $, lots of it too. But when the other manufacturers machines will spread soybean seed on top of clay ground the Deere will plant the center of the highway and have proper seed to soil contact. But expensive.

 

Have to agree with Toyes Hill on this. We had a Great Plains no-till drill. Is nothing more than a heavy duty 3 point drill behind a coulter cart. While it does work and is simple to set up, it doesn't really work that well. With the placement of the no-till coulters if you have any kind of rolling or uneven ground, part of the time the coulters will be running way too deep and other times they will be out of the ground.

We are running a Hiniker 30' at the moment for planting beans and if I ever have the chance I'd like to replace it with a John Deere CCS No-till Air drill which basically uses the same planter units as the no till drills.

 

Thanks fellas. Used to rent a drill(hayybuster) from local co-op, but they quit handling it because renters kept it inoperable. I would spend half a day trying to get it to work properly. Regards, Mike