The Pottinger Terrasem C6 seed drill promises a number of time-and-seed saving features.
In August I headed to the heartland of New Zealand’s arable industry, mid-Canterbury, to witness a drill promising to deliver all this. The Pottinger Terrasem C6 drill, was sowing processing peas on Keith Wild’s property near Chertsey.
The Pottinger Terrasem disc drill is designed as a trailing cultivator drill in order to cut down the number of passes required when establishing crops in a cultivated seedbed. The drill works in three sections — tillage equipment at the front, followed by a packer roller, followed by the disc coulters for sowing.
At the front, a telescopic drawbar allows the drill to be used on tractors with duals, without compromising manoeuvrability.
The tillage equipment at the front end of the drill uses two gangs of 510mm scalloped discs at opposing angles to loosen and break up the soil while incorporating trash. I think it did a pretty impressive job.
A tyre packer roller, after the tillage equipment and before the seed coulters, is used to consolidate the seedbed before drilling, using twelve 425/55 R17 tyres arranged in three sections. This is probably the widest packer tyre I have come across on a drill and it was doing an excellent job.
A decent-sized seed hopper mounts longitudinally down the length of the machine and, at 3000 litres, has plenty of capacity to keep you drilling for longer between fills, even when drilling larger seeds at higher rates.
The distribution head is at the rear of the machine, above the centre section with 48 outlets. I believe this had two stand-out features incorporated into it, the first being a half-width shut, using a hydraulic ram to close off half of the outlets to one side of the drill.
The in-cab control box for this machine is an ISOBUS compatible ARTIS box, featuring a back-lit colour screen and a membrane panel with the buttons to control it. This control box was simple to use, with a customisable home screen displaying the forward speed, fan speed, seed rate, hopper level and the area covered.
A drill like this is a huge investment for any farming operation, although there are some massive gains and savings to be made cutting down the number of cultivating passes over a field before sowing. I imagine this drill could easily cut out at least one or two passes in most situations.
Read the full review in NewFarmMachinery magazine’s December issue, on-sale December 23. Subscribe to the magazine to receive each issue at your doorstep.
Photography: Brent Lilley