Canola growers looking for ways to set a target plant stand are considering setting aside the air drill or air seeder and instead working around the possible drawbacks of a row-crop planter.

"Has anyone done any experimenting with a planter to plant canola?" one poster asked recently on ProBoards' Combine Talk Forum. "In theory it should allow for a lower planting rate, and precise seed placement and spacing -- would this not lead to a yield response?"

Grainews editor Jay Whetter recently profiled just such a farmer on his blog. Manitoba farmer Cody Falk said he was able to put in 1,000 acres of canola in 2009 using a John Deere 1790 CCS planter, with a sugar beet disc in the unit's seed-singulator mechanism.

Sugar beet seeds are relatively small, Whetter wrote, so Falk was able to use the disc effectively to seed large-sized hybrid canola varieties. Smaller canola seed varieties could get stuck in the mechanism, but Falk said that mechanism could be tightened up to prevent such a problem.

Falk farms at Plum Coulee, about 15 km east of Winkler, in Manitoba's Pembina Valley. He said he decided to try the planter after finding his Deere disc drill didn't work as well as he'd like on heavier clay land. The planter was also available, as canola generally goes in before soybeans or corn.

Seeding canola on 15-inch rows, Falk found a benefit in being able to dial in his seed count per acre, starting with 200,000 (about five pounds per acre for the larger-sized hybrids) and dialing back to as low as 100,000 (around 2.5 pounds per acre).

"There was zero difference in yield between the seeding rates," Falk told Whetter, adding that the canola also seemed to swath better and that he wished he'd left check strips to see whether wider rows would help relieve disease pressure.

Of course, a planter precludes single-pass seeding and fertilizer applications, so Falk had to float granular fertilizer onto the field ahead of time. A farmer could use a liquid kit to set up a planter for one-pass seeding and fertilizing, he suggested.

"Important features to look for in a planter to handle canola is a vacuum-style singulator that sucks individual seeds -- especially light-weight seeds -- into the seed disc, and a hydraulic drive that can spin the disc fast enough to keep your seeding rate up," Whetter wrote.

Farmers discussing the idea online wondered whether weed control would be an issue in wider-row spacing, and warned that a monitor might have difficulty catching such small seeds.

"Overall it is a big hassle, and (I) don't know if it would be worth it for commercial canola production," one farmer wrote.

"Is it worth it or necessary? Who knows?" another wrote. "But I like the concept. Good luck."