KVERNELAND HEADLAND NEWS
OPTIMA V DELIVERS WITH SEED FLEXIBILITY
Looking for a one-drill-suits-all approach for maize, fodder beet and turnips, Scottish Contractor of the Year 2025, David Laird from Bellowbank Carbello Farm, Ayrshire, settled on a six-row Kverneland Optima V from local dealer J&S Montgomery.
“With electric seed metering on each row, and the ability to swap discs, we can use one precision drill for all our small seeds,” explains David Laird. “Myself and operator Ross Anderson could see how it would make us more efficient and also lead to delivering a better result for our customers.” With hydraulically adjustable row width, the six-row mounted Optima V can be used at 75cm spacing for maize, and 50cm spacing for turnips and fodder beet, as operator Ross Anderson, pictured, explains. “With automatic section control, the Optima has proved to be a very accurate machine, regardless of the seed type we use,” says Ross. “And the fertiliser placement is every bit as good as the seed placement too, which is also very important for our customers.” “Those double disc coulters do a superb job of opening the soil and dropping in fertiliser, while the steel press wheels that follow the seed placement, are the key to making sure we get fantastic seed-to-soil contact.”
“The germination and plant spacing we’ve experienced is absolutely superb, and it’s all shown on the in-cab screen,” says Ross. “There’s no guesswork, no doubles and no misses.” Ross says that to get the operational flexibility that the firm needed, the Kverneland drill factory in Soest, Germany, manufactured steel discs specifically to handle turnip seeds with the Optima V. “It takes about an hour to swap a full set of discs,” he says. “It’s really easy to do. And being an Isobus machine, it’s plug-and- play on my Fendt 718 Gen 6. Everything is on the control terminal for me to see, and I can choose to operate the drill based on seeds/hectare, or set the machine according to its row spacings. With wider rows, the gap between seeds down the row is tighter, to compensate.” “And as a six-row drill, this is an ideal match for our six-row beet harvester,” he adds. “It’s also very manoeuvrable, as I can just close the drill frame and go down the road. If we had more rows, we would lose operational flexibility. This is, by far, the best solution for the business.”
“There’s no guesswork, no doubles and no misses.” Ross Anderson, operator
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