Small Farm Equipment Review Part II – The Jang Seeder

As promised, here is the thrilling second part to my as-of-yet-undetermined-number-of-parts series on small farm equipment: The Jang Seeder.

Seeding in the early spring

On our farm, we make vegetables in two ways; we either start them in the greenhouse and, when they are big enough, transplant them…

Transplanting Broccoli

…or we direct seed them.

Direct seeding, at its core, is how plants propagate themselves. Seeds carried by wind, animal, or gravity end up on or in the ground, whereupon they germinate, put down roots, and grow. When Siri and I had a garden, we direct seeded vegetables by hand – scoring a line in the soil, dropping seeds in every little bit, and then covering them with dirt. This method works fine for small spaces, but as the length and number of rows you want to seed increases, using a mechanical seeder is much more efficient.

There are a variety of mechanical seeders available. For the smaller scale, push seeders such as the well known Earthway seeder and the Planet Jr are inexpensive small-farm staples. We have an Earthway and a European Push Seeder for using in our greenhouses (and as backups in case something happens to our big seeder). Push seeders are great, and many farms larger than us use them exclusively. The advantages of push seeders are that they are inexpensive ($100 for an Earthway, $400 for a push version of our Jang seeder), don’t need any additional equipment to operate, and can be used by anyone. It has also been our experience that, because the operator has such a great view of the seeder and the seeds as they are dropped into the furrow, push seeders work better in imperfect soil. The person doing the seeding can respond to issues – blockages, clods, etc – immediately.

As you start using tractors for tillage and cultivation, and as the acreage you want to direct seed increases, using tractor mounted seeders becomes more efficient. Larger tillers (see my previous post) can create a very fine and level seedbed, and with three or more seeders ganged together, you can put a lot of seeds in the ground in pretty short order. For small farms like ours, the Planet Jr. seeder, mounted on a tractor, has been the gold standard since it was invented some 60 years ago. The problem with the Planet Jr is that it’s imprecise. The seeder works by brushing seeds through varying sized holes. The operator determines the seeding rate by choosing larger or smaller holes holes. We found that seeds go in too thickly or too sparsely and rarely just right.

So, given the opportunity this past spring to start afresh, we decided to try an untested (for us or anyone we knew) but decidedly more modern seeder. There are many very expensive, fancy vacuum seeders that big farms have used for decades. These seeders can cost upwards of $5000 per row. They use vacuum technology to separate seeds and drop them, one at a time, at predetermined intervals. Seeds are spaced very precisely, such that farmers on large farms can precisely plan how many seeds they’ll need, and how many plants they’ll get per acre. The Jang seeder, which can be calibrated nearly as accurately as the vacuum seeders, costs about $1100 per row for the 3-point hitch mounted version we chose.

Instead of using a vacuum to singulate seeds, the Jang seeder uses a nifty combination of brushes and a roller with precisely spaced divots sized for the type of seeds you are using.

If you look closely at the picture below, you’ll see a black roller with divots in the middle of the clear plastic hopper. Each divot is sized (more or less) precisely for each particular type or family of seeds.

Looking down the hopper from above

When the hopper is filled with seeds, the seeds fill the divots in the roller. The roller passes by a brush, ensuring that only one seed remains in each divot, before it drops the seeds, one by one, into a furrow created by the seeder. An interchangeable gear and chain system, similar to one found on a bike, can vary the rate the seed roller turns. In this way, the seeder can space seeds as closely as 1/2 inch and as far apart as 9 inches.

Attached to a makeshift 3-point hitch on the Cub

Using a precision seeder has changed the way we farm. In years past, we’d invariably have spaced our turnips, beets, carrots, etc too close together (the advantage of spacing seeds closely was that the number of bunches we’d get per bed would be higher, even though the time to maturity and speed of harvest was slower). Harvesting would involve searching through a sea of leaves for appropriately sized roots to bunch. The smaller, unharvested neighbors would be left for days or weeks to be given time to grow. Harvesting took a long time.

Now, all our roots are spaced exactly 1/2 inch or 1 inch apart. They mature mostly all at once, and harvesting is very fast. The issue we were dealing with changed from, Will we have time to harvest all the radishes we can sell? to, Can we sell all the radishes we have harvested?

Clean-harvesting a bed of radishes

This altered the way we think about seeding, harvesting, farm labor, what size farm we should be… with this new seeder we found that we were able to harvest much, much faster. We brought more food to the market, so we sold more food. We also turned beds over faster. This year, we put nearly every bed we used directly into a cover crop when we were done. But if we had wanted to plant a second crop, there were more opportunities to do so.

The seeder does have a few drawbacks…. the biggest issue we had this past season is with beets. The seeder does a great job of picking up one seed at a time, so long as the seeds are uniform in size. The problem with beets? Their size varies a lot, their shape is not uniform, and each beet seed is actually a bunch of seeds clumped together. So seeds ended up getting jammed in the divots and seeds went in too thickly or much to sparsely. We did a few things to semi-solve this problem. First off, we bought a special roller that was extra deep, to keep the seeds from getting jammed in the divot. Second, we raised the brush a little and removed the curved, felt-covered seed guide. This stopped the seeds from getting jammed in the roller. The problem this created, unfortunately, is that it resulted in seeds going in too thick, since the deeper roller often had two seeds in it and there was no system to knock the second seed out of the divot. I think we’ll try spacing our beets even wider next year to see whether that effectively counteracts the spacing problem.

Another drawback of the seeder is that you have to buy a lot of seed rollers. We have a three row unit, which means that for each type of seed we use, we need three rollers of that type – and the rollers cost between $20 and $40 each. We bought rollers for turnips, radishes, two sizes of lettuce (we only use the larger size), three different sized rollers for beets (sigh), spinach, and carrots. I think we ended up spending an additional $300 on rollers. Also, as I mentioned above, some rollers work better than others. The rollers for turnips, radishes, and carrots are phenomenal. You could set your ruler by the seedlings. Rollers for other things, irregularly shaped seeds specifically, aren’t so precise. We also ended up using some rollers for seeds they weren’t intended for, because we hand’t bought, for instance, the parsnip specific roller.

One last note on salad mix. For things we like to plant super thickly, like salad mix and arugula, we ended up using a roller that picks up many seeds at a time because the seeder can only space seeds as close as 1/2 an inch. This worked really well. We used the larger lettuce specific roller (a divot shaped like a plus) for all direct seeded arugula, lettuce, mustards, etc. We found that this system spaced the plants more widely than we had been accustomed to, but adequately close for harvesting baby-sized greens. We noticed that the greens grew faster, due to the slightly wider spacing, and seemed healthier, also due to the wider spacing.

Adequately thick salad greens

One of the coolest aspects of the Jang seeder is how it has introduced us to other farmers around the country. We seem to be one of the few farms out there that have one, and certainly one of the only farms out there blogging about them. So we’ve been contacted by a bunch of farmers out there who want to know more about the seeder. I think the information sharing this has facilitated is amazing. When we started farming, it felt a little bit like we were alone in the woods, trying to reinvent a million wheels all at once. Information felt hard to come by and frequently outdated or not specific to our operation. We love getting the opportunity to teach and learn and share with everyone out there trying to reinvent their own wheels… hopefully, together, we can make all our lives just a little easier, more efficient, and more profitable.