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Abstract
One of the most critical operations during the growing season is planting. Many current vacuum planter designs have a limit of approximately 5 miles per hour (mph). However, newly developed components by companies such as Precision Planting promise to exceed these limits. The main objective of this project has been to evaluate the effectiveness of these components during corn and peanut planting by measuring how well the crop emerges, how uniformly placed each seed is, and the effect on yield as planting speed increases. Evaluations are performed on the effects of settings such as downforce within a traditional planter to find routes for increasing planting speed. Results show that incorporating advanced planting components into corn planting greatly improves the uniformity of planter performance up to 10 mph. They have also shown that applying downforce does not offset the penalties on a ground-drive planter beyond 3 mph during peanut planting.