Check row planting

How did check row planting work? Did you have to set the string every round? Received a stack of old 2 cylinder magazines and they had a picture of a guy using a check row planter.

We used a check row planter to plant test plots for the seed corn company I worked for in college. We moved the close end of the cable every time- when the planter was lifted, it released the cable, I jumped off the planter and moved the stake while the driver turned the tractor around, then hooked the cable into the planter again before climbing back on.

Wire had knots at evenly spaced intervals. As planter crossed the field planter would be triggered by knots. Wire had to be moved with every pass of the planter. Idea was that plants grew in a grid pattern which allowed for cultivating both with the rows and across them as well. Not very efficient use of the land compared with today's narrow rows and high density planting.

The old system used a wire, kept on a spool. It was strung across the field, secured to a post or fence and moved for every pass. It had loops in it, like a splice, every so many inches. As the loops went thru a device on the planter, it triggered a 'seed drop'... I don't remember the actual spacing.

Do a search for check row planting utube and it should bring up several videos

Thanks for the info. I utubed it but they never showed turning it around. So you only had to reset one stake at a time.

Usual spacing was 42 inches, as determined by the distance between the knots in the wire. The wire was anchored at each end of the field by a special steel stake with a step and a slot to hold the wire. Checked corn was pretty hard on a mechanical picker, especially if there was 4 stalks per hill. The picker would run empty between the hills and then hit the 4 stalks that sometimes would almost stall the tractor. Made for an interesting ride on a mounted picker!

You have to reset the stake on the end of the field you are turning around at. So, you get off and pull the stake , pull the wire over and reset stake at each end of field , put the wire back into the check row head and go. Then when the corn comes up you see how good a job you did of tensioning the wire etc. Makes it real interesting to cross cultivate if you don't do a good job with the wire. It was always a bragging point with fellow farmers on who did the best job of checking their corn.

My dad planted with a two row John Deere planter and a team of horses. The horses were also a bragging point. Dad fell asleep one time while planting and woke up when the horses stopped at the end of the field. Neighbor fell asleep and woke up to the horses going across the field in wrong direction.

We actually sold a few 4 row check row planters in late 50's, early 60's and I had to go out and tinker with one. Kind of out of my league to say the least.

We always called the wire 'check wire'. The planter driver got on and off the tractor a good many times in a day of planting. There was an art to getting the wire stretched just right so the rows lined up both east and west and at angles. I was too young to plant with wire but I do remember dad doing it when i was a little kid.

Needless to say, you didn't check plant on a contour. And a field with a tree in the middle made it interesting, as well.

We planted some hybrid poplar trees about 20 years ago, I had a nylon string with a mark on it every 7 feet. These trees require cultivating so that way we were able to cultivate in both directions in some areas. The trouble with a nylon string is it stretches too easy, but we were able to cross cultivate.

The knots on the wire were set for the same distance between as the distance between rows. A 40" row spacing you wanted a wire with the knots set at 40", If you were on 42" rows you bought the wire for 42", if on 38" rows bought wire for 38". In other words you wanted the spacing between hills the same as spacing between rows. Most were planted on 40" rows

Still have a two row check planter with the check wire and stakes. Always wanted to use it one more time, but likely will. Not mentioned is the advantage of cross cultivating. I started cultivating with my Dad's WC Allis with well worn steering. Going cross ways was not fun. Dad finely got a H JD which was a dream for cultivating compared to the WC. Dad was good and the rows were straight in both directions.

Also, my Job was to walk the field and hand plant any missed hills of corn

Some of the differences we had with planting test plots: the field farmer ran his planter over the area with all the inputs less seed, so the rows were marked out already for us. Our planter cable had plastic knobs installed on it at longer distances- I think it was 15 feet, so when the knob hit the planter, it triggered a solenoid that opened a cup and dropped the seeds into a large cone, which singled the seeds like an old plate planter, then dropped them down into a Kinze row unit. The rider was responsible to tear the two little bags of seed off of the twine which held all the different seed samples, and dump them into the cups before the next knob hit, then move the cable at the end of the rows.

We had counted out the seeds and put them in the little bags and placed the bags on the twine in specific order, to keep the varieties straight, back in the spring. You ended up with X number of seeds planted in two rows, then a gap, then another variety in two rows, etc. Every row end we marked by using "blue" corn seed, where the plant turns purple when it dries down, to mark the ends of the rows. We came back after the plants sprouted up and thinned the row to a certain number of plants. The farmer then cared for the plot like the rest of his corn all season, and we returned with a Gleaner E combine that had been modified to harvest one ten-foot section of two rows, stop and wait as the machine cleaned the seeds, then weighed them and measured moisture, then transfer the crop into the bulk tank before moving to the next variety. Very interesting, yet mind-numbing at the same time.

These pictures were taken at the Albert City Iowa show several years back. It was a Gathering of the Orange (AC) show, so the planter had to be AC! I found it to be fascinating. I never have farmed, but Dad grew up on one. He was a preacher in a rural community, and one field was still being check planted. (1970s)

That's just the way it was here, 42 inch rows, etc. My dad and uncle used to plant with horses and John Deere 999 planter and always did a pretty good job.....They took a lot of pride in their work. I cultivated and "cross cultivated" check rowed corn a couple of times with my uncle's 1941 Farmall H equipped with the model 221 2 row cultivators. It was pretty easy except in side hills, there you had to really "watch your knitin'" and go slow even if the corn was a foot tall or more because that steerable type cultivator could side shift a little and it was very easy to overcorrect on the steering wheel which yanked the cultivator over too much too fast and you could yank out a couple hills real quick........I remember having to stop and reset some I cultivated out. I don't remember us picking any, didn't have a picker then, had a husker-shredder instead, but it was pretty neat cutting it by hand like we did to open up the field before we brought in the tractor and corn binder to cut the whole field. You had to yank hard on the corn knife to cut 3 or 4 stalks at once but about 3 cuts got you an arm load. We usually shocked the hand cut corn in the field corners as we cut it., but let the rest lay in 12-15 stalk bunches and shocked it when we shocked the rest after cutting it with a binder. Shocking corn after it was cut with the binder was kinda hard work because you had to pick up the bundles of 12-15 stalks off the ground and stand them upright in the "corn horse" thing we used to build the shock around.
Silo filling wasn't quite so bad, we had a bundle elevator thing on the binder that brought up the bundles to a level of about 8 feet to be hand loaded on flat rack wagons which were then hauled to the ensilage cutter at the silo. Still work all right but at least you didn't have to pick up the stuff off the ground.
After we gave up check row planting because it was just too much trouble getting off and on the tractor at every turn around to reset the stake we went to hill dropping the seed in 3 seed hills....The idea being you could throw a little more dirt in the corn row with the cultivator for better weed control because 3 plants could stand up better against the force of the dirt than just 1 plant could. Of course you couldn't cross cultivate hill dropped corn because the hills weren't located by check wire. Only did the hill drop thing for a couple years.

I never heard of an Allis pull type planter in that age. The first Allis planters I ever heard of were the mounted snap coupler planters and to me that does not look like a mounted planter. Correct me if I am wrong on this.