We Love Our One-Row Potato Planter

We Love Our One-Row Potato Planter PLANTERS Planters 23-5-4 "We can plant 400 to 500 lbs. of potatoes in an hour. It works as well as any commercial planter we've ever seen," says Floyd Keller, Osage, Sask., who built a 3-pt. mounted potato planter from scratch. It consists of a single 4-ft. "shank" made out of 3 by 5-in. rectangular tubing. The shank is hollow. The bottom end is angled up toward the back at a 48 degree angle so the seed spud can drop out. A pared-down chisel point welds to the front of the shank. A 5-gal. plastic bucket mounts on each side of the shank to hold potatoes for planting. A bar across the front of the shank hitches to the lower hitch arms. The top link pins to a fitting on the shank. The planter rides on a single wheel that Keller took off an old swather. A tractor seat mounts above the wheel for the operator (Keller's wife) who drops the seed potatoes by hand into the shank. The wheel runs directly over the furrow. It packs the trench and a long piece of heavy chain drags behind the planter to cover it up. "It creates beautiful stands of potatoes. It works so well I did some planting for a neighbor who then asked me to build him one. His tractor didn't have a 3-pt. hitch so I made a trailing unit that's raised and lowered by tractor hydraulics," says Keller. He plants potatoes in rows spaced 5 ft. apart and cultivates them with an 8-ft. cultivator. On the gang that runs over the row, he cut out the center shovel and half of each shovel behind so he can run right over the row. He also built a simple hiller that he uses to mound dirt over the row. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Floyd Keller, Box 35, Osage, Sask. S0G 3T0 Canada (ph 306 722-3741).

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