2-28 IAT Kinze Tech Wonder

A Kinze technological development that might blow your socks off or at the very least, increase yields. Kinze Manufacturing announced the world's first electric multi-hybrid concept planter. This will allow farmers to change the seed hybrid they are planting automatically as the planter moves through the field. Rhett Schildroth - Kinze's senior product manager - explains what this new technology means for agriculture. "Kinze's electric multi-hybrid concept planter will allow farmers to select feed hybrids and automatically plant them to suit different field management zones instead of selecting an average seed variety to use across an entire field. For example, if parts of the field have high productivity soil a racehorse seed variety can be utilized. Whereas a work horse seed variety can be used in the less productive areas. In fields with poor drainage, a variety that can handle moisture can be planted in the lower areas, with a more productive variety used in field locations with a higher elevation."

Schildroth says the electric multi-hybrid planter will allow farmers to maximize yield in every part of their field without making compromises. "The yield gains in our trials varied from 2 bushels per acre to more than 10 bushels per acre by using multi-hybrid planting. Unlike other crop practices that seemed to have good results one year and negative results the next, every trial that we have conducted with multi-hybrid planting as resulted in a yield increase."