Who is the villain in soybean planting?

Brazil is expecting to have another record grain production harvest. Conab's first estimate for the 2020/21 soybean season is 133,5 million tons, 7% more than the 2019/20 harvest. The optimism is for better productivity, which could reach 58,8 sc/ha on average.

However, for these numbers to be confirmed, producers need to be even more efficient, especially when it comes to planting. According to the late professor Dirceu Gassen, author of the famous phrase “productivity is the knowledge accumulated per hectare”, a seed failure per linear meter can generate losses of up to 400 kg/ha of soybeans.

For the first time, the secrets about the spaced distribution of soybean seeds, intellectual property involved in this process will be revealed and which country will plant increasingly better soybeans and surpass its competitors, are you ready?

But after all, who is the villain in the distribution of soybean seeds in pneumatic dosers? Seed driver? Disc diameter? Or disk rotation? Hold on a bit, we’ll return to this topic in a bit!

What do you do when you dedicate yourself to a project for four years and everything goes wrong? In 2017, J.Assy launched Selenium, the first pneumatic doser, and after excellent results in the off-season with corn, we faced major challenges in planting soybeans, basically due to the traction system adopted in the planters.

We looked into the topic: what affects the distribution of soybean seeds in pneumatic dosers? Equipped with 240 frames per second camcorders (today we already have 1.000), data loggers, pneumatic adapters, we headed to the field. Little dust is nonsense and we continue towards Mato Grosso do Sul.

The first surprising observation: most errors in the distribution of soybean seeds occur when they are released by the disc, that is, when the vacuum is cut. The disc's scoop and the seed's dynamics at this crucial moment are the villains... or the heroes.

We went back to the laboratory, and worked in the indoor simulator, an exclusive 12 meter long track, where an electric cart pulls a planting line, and the seeds fall into the grease. You can analyze each stage of the seed fall, in detail. The days passed without realizing it, anxiety was high, we knew that something significant that could bring productivity gains to Brazilian soybeans was about to be revealed.

We compared several pneumatic dosers on the market and realized that there was a lot of room for improvement. We arrived at a simple but surprising discovery. There is an ideal shape and ideal disk dynamics that minimize errors. SojaFlow was born in 2018. Best spaced distribution of soybeans on the market. Brazilian technology for the world.

How to protect this intellectual property?

We had technological innovation, but it was impressively simple, which could be a problem. After meetings with patent teams from Brazil and the United States, we arrived at a strong and pertinent text: another Brazilian intellectual property protected in the world. But, after all, who is the villain in the distribution of soybean seeds in pneumatic dosers?

We conclude that there is a correlation between the size and tangential speed of the disc and also the number and shape of the holes that minimize the relevance of the seed conductor and even the planting speed!

Discs rotating at low speeds, contrary to what is currently imagined, can be disastrous for the spaced distribution of soybean seeds. The drivers, as long as they are designed and aligned with the dynamics of the doser, which is not simple, are not the villains of this soap opera, for planting at speeds that the soil conditions allow.

We also note the importance of graphite in the spaced distribution of soybean seeds, it helps it not to be delayed at that crucial moment, when it is released from the disc. Important recommendation, which applies to any doser. It's worth adding a lot of precision to precision farming.

Agronomic research highlights the importance of spaced seed distribution in soybean productivity. The Brazilian farmer made direct planting and off-season farming possible, and will continue to be the main protagonist, he is the one who takes companies out of their comfort zones. Using graphite and the best dosing technologies available on the Brazilian market, there are no longer villains in soybean planting, the Brazilian farmer has all the tools to have the best spaced distribution of soybean seeds in the world.

We also revealed the secrets of planting canola for the Canadian market, but that is a topic for a future topic.

By founder of J.Assy and Agribusiness Consultant, Zé Roberto Assy