Bulk Tank Fills Planter

Bulk tank fills planter PLANTERS Planters 16-2-10 Minnesota farmer Harlan Anderson says his bulk seed hopper makes filling planters and drills easy and fast. "We've used 50 cu. ft. bulk seed bags for about l0 years but we could never find a good way to get seed from the bags to the planter. Most of the gadgets we came up with resulted in lost time and seed on the ground. "Finally, we came up with the idea of making a metal hopper that we could load direct from seed bags. We fitted the hopper with 34 by 8-in. pieces of sq. tubing so we can handle it with our forklift (we bought our forklift 14 years ago and wouldn't farm without it). You could also mount the tank on a front end loader. "A slide gate at the bottom of the hop-per controls flow of seed. A flexible funnel attaches beneath the slide gate and feeds into a `trombone style' PVC pipe that loads seed into planter hoppers. The operator starts and stops the flow of seed by pulling on ropes attached to either side of the slide gate at the bottom of the hopper. "This system requires no augers or motors to handle seed, all the way from the seed plant to the planter. Bulk bags are cheap and reuseable and the savings of bulk seed compared to bagged seed is considerable. Our hopper holds about 50 cu. ft. Once a day we fill the hopper from a gravity box or seed bag. We can carry more than one hopper to the field at a time since they'll stand side by side on a truck or trailer bed. We sell the hoppers for $795 each. "These hoppers have worked so well for us we intend to make similar units to handle dry fertilizer. In the off season, we use them to fill livestock feeders and to handle minor ingredients that we mix into our TMR mixer for our dairy herd." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Harlan R. Anderson, Rt. 1, Box 55, Cokato, Minn. 55321 (ph 612 286-5682).

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