Hydraulic Downforce Ag Leader

How deep do you plant your crop? You can measure the offset between the blades and the gauge wheels, but that does not always answer the question. In dry, tight soils, how do you know that your seed trench is cutting to the correct depth? In loose or moist soils, how do you know that you’re not going too deep when the row unit sinks? The answer to both of these questions could be to wait until emergence, and then you’ll definitely know—or, consider investing in Ag Leader SureForce.

Utilizing Ag Leader SureForce, each row unit has a cylinder-style actuator that presses the unit to the ground. How much downforce is needed to plant? There needs to be enough downforce to maintain the right seed-trench depth, but how much is that? The Ag Leader SureForce system utilizes strain gauges to determine how many pounds of weight are registering on the gauge wheels—with that information, you can customize how much pressure you want to have on the row units, or you can let the InCommand 1200 display make the decisions for you based on the changing soil conditions. Response time for changing soil conditions is in fractions of a second, compared to what is often several seconds of adjustment on a pneumatic-style downforce system.

By the way: SureForce is Ag Leader’s newest and slickest option for providing individual-row downforce+uplift control … They still offer other configurations for a variety of price points. For instance, if you have either the Integra or InCommand 1200 display, you can outfit your planter with 1- or 2-channel monitoring, or you can set up for an 8-channel control using any ISOBUS (Virtual Terminal) display. However, at this time, individual-row control is only available with SureForce using the InCommand 1200 display.

Functions Served:

Planting