Kinze New Planter

The world’s first electric multi-hybrid planter, from Kinze, allows farmers to optimize their seed hybrids for their fields, eliminating the compromises most farmers are used to making when planting. Kinze Manufacturing has been monitoring the performance of their multi-hybrid planter on various test plots this past harvest season. Phil Jennings, Kinze’s Service Manager, explains how the planter works: “The multi-hybrid planter is an opportunity for farmers to change the hybrid on-the-fly. This is automatic and is based on a map which actually changes your genetic hybrid while you are going through the field and that happens within a single seed drop in the row so that there is no visible gaps or overlaps when switching from one hybrid to the other.”

Kinze first announced the concept planter in December of 2013. Since then, six different farmers have been testing the planters on their fields. “The information that is probably on most peoples’ minds is what’s the payback, what’s my return? We have two years worth of yield data out there. We are still working for the harvest of 2014 but up to this point, we have very positive results that every test plot that we have done on every full farm plot that we have done, outperforms planting a single variety.” Starting in 2015, producers can purchase the planter to use in their fields