Our New Vacuum Seeder - One Year Later

We made a large new purchase for the farm last season: a new electric vacuum seeder. I just made a video on our socials about this vacuum seeder so I thought it’d be fun to revisit this blog post from last year and add some thoughts after our first season with it.

What is a vacuum seeder?

A vacuum seeder uses suction with air to hold the seeds to a plate. The plate rotates based on spacing needs and the vacuum is cut when the plate rotates to the position where the seed is supposed to be dropped into it’s furrow. Our particular vacuum seeder has a multitude of different plates with different spacing and hole sizes to accommodate a wide variety of seeds.

Vacuum seeders have much better seed singulation. That is, making sure a single seed is dropped at the designated spacing instead of a multitude of seeds. That’s because the suction of the air holding the seeds against the plate is easier than trying to have a single hole size that fits a the variability that comes with seeds. Not all seeds are the same size even within the exact same crop and variety!

Our new vacuum seeder! First crop seeded with it was beets.

How are other seeder types different?

Our other seeders, the Jang and Hoss seeders both work similarly. Each have a seed plate or seed puck that has holes drilled into it for different seed sizes and spacing. Instead of air suction through vacuum holding the seeds in the plate/puck only gravity allows the seed to fill the hole. Because the holes need to accommodate the variability in seed sizes even within crops you inevitable end up either jamming seeds or dropping more seeds than necessary.

Which crops will we plant with the vacuum seeder?

One of the things we love about the vacuum seeder we bought is that it can be used for a number of different crops. We plan to use it to seed peas, green beans, popcorn, sweet corn, beets, cucumbers, zucchini, summer squash & melons.

In particular I’ve been very frustrated with our Hoss seeder in our popcorn & sweet corn. The Hoss is just not accurate enough to singulate seeds nor does it achieve the desired spacing. We end up with lots of doubles, triples or gaps which is a problem because we’re either spending labor thinning doubles and triples or spending labor weeding gaps where there are no crops. The vacuum seeder will solve these problems for us!

My thoughts after one year of use:

Overall, I really like the vacuum seeder. It’s allowed us to have much better stands of various crops such as sweet corn, popcorn, green beans and others. That’s beneficial in two ways. First, we get a better harvest for each unit of space our crops take up. That’s because each seed is more accurately dropped so we have very few gaps or doubles. Compounding on that benefit is that we reduce weed competition because our crops shade out more of the weed more quickly. Second, we reduce labor both because of the crop canopy and because we don’t have to spend time thinning crops.

Some things I don’t like about it are that the motor feels really underpowered. I have to push when going uphill with the speed dial cranked to its maximum setting. I don’t love the design of the depth adjustment. It has almost too granular of settings so it’s hard to get things where you want them to be. Finally, and most importantly, is the cost. The unit was close to $6000 new with seed plates and other required accessories. It will take a few years for the unit to pay for itself but it has definitely earned its spot on our farm!