Farm Tidbits - Corn Planter Repurposed

We are doing some more experimenting, this time to use a corn planter to plant sorghum sudan. Sorghum Sudan is a very fast growing grass that is native to Africa, I’ve measured it average 5” of growth per day!
In previous years we have gotten inconsistent stands using a no-till drill and can only get a good stand if we till the field prior to planting. Obviously, we aren’t a fan of tilling. So last Fall we did our first experiment with using our corn planter for sorghum.
We bought new plates to hold the tiny seed and bought some larger gears to get the planter spinning fast enough to drop enough seeds. Sorghum Sudan should be planted at 200,000+ seeds per acre where corn is 32,000. Absolutely love how the field looks after planting directly into some grazed ryegrass. The corn planter puts little slits in the ground and immediately covers back up the slit.

We are hoping we get a really good stand like we did last Fall and with near 0 erosion. The plan is for the ryegrass to naturally die in the heat of the summer and the sorghum sudan grass to take over. Then in September we will reverse the operation and plant ryegrass into the sorghum sudan. In the middle we will get a tremendous amount of forage for late July, August and early September.