Farmers Forum staff
BRINSTON — The Westervelt family farm is a modern dairy operation with cow-milking robots near Brinston, south of Winchester. But functional equipment from the past still has a place, such as the vintage Massey Ferguson 33 “nine-foot” seed drill that farm partner Martin Westervelt used April 20 to plant 40 acres with a mixture of alfalfa, oats and peas.
The old planter was the first piece of equipment purchased by Martin’s Dutch-immigrant father, Gerrit, in the 1950s, and was also used to plant corn many years ago. These days, the unit only gets about 7 hours of use each spring to put in the new forage acreage in the farm’s annual crop rotation. It simply wouldn’t make sense to spend thousands of dollars on a new seeder for this purpose when the old one does the job so well, Martin observes.
The entire mechanism is wheel driven with no need for hydraulics and has two seed boxes to allow the farmer to plant two different seed mixtures at one time.
Westervelt also pulls a roller packer behind the seeder, which helps to fully incorporate the alfalfa seed into the soil. The oats-and-peas mix (in the top box) and the alfalfa seeds (bottom box) flow down separate, parallel seed tubes beneath the seed boxes and drop a few inches to the soil. The seeds land in channels cut into the soil by discs beneath the planter.
