'EXCITED FOR THE POSSIBILITIES' Meyer brings planter design to life

BY DOUG CLOUGH

HOLSTEIN — Kyle Meyer recalls, as a high school kid, his father encouraging him to use their farm’s shop equipment to “‘tear stuff apart and put it back together.”

He made trailers and built dozer blades to fit tractors to push silage.

“I enjoyed welding and designing parts that would make farming easier,” said Meyer. “I built a dozen blades after having a few prospects who were interested.”

After high school, Meyer attended Iowa State University earning an Agriculture Systems Technology degree.

“It was a good way to combine my farming background with design,” said Meyer. “The handson electrical and hydraulic labs were useful as I wanted to create my own designs and test them in the field.”

Meyer worked for an Amesarea farmer while in school and built a dozer blade for him.

After graduating from ISU in 2005, Meyer — now 39 –began his farming career two miles north and an one-eighth of a mile east of town. Farming with his father, they have grown their corn and soybean rotation to 3,000 acres.

“We typically have a field or two of alfalfa, also,” said Meyer. “There’s a good-sized dairy down the road, and we sell the feed to them. It’s a good relationship.”

Meyer’s farm acreage isn’t the only thing that’s grown, however; he married wife Dana, 33, in 2017, and the couple have two children, Adalyn, 4, and 2-year-old Olivia.

One of the things that has remained constant for Meyer has been his love for designing equipment that makes life on the farm increasingly productive.

“For the past six years, I’ve been thinking about what an ideal planter should be like,” said Meyer. “While planters are typically anywhere from 20to 90-feet wide, I’m making a 60-foot planter, 24-row, 30-inch. I made it a goal to create something compact and efficient to travel with down the road.”

Other qualities of planterdesign importance to Meyer include: n A short wheelbase with a narrow transport width making the planter easy to maneuver. n Locating the seed tanks out to the wings, causing less compaction issues. n Creating a clean toolbar design, routing hoses and wiring harnesses more efficiently. n Reducing the hydraulic requirements from the tractor.

“Overall, I want this planter to be well-refined, so owning it will pay off for the farmer. Most planters are overloaded in the center,” said Meyer. “I wanted to alleviate this problem while also solving other common large planter problems causing strain on their components.”

Meyer, during the winter of 2020, began designing his planter with computer-aided design (CAD), making parts based on his overall goal to be compact and efficient to travel to the farmer’s field. Meyer’s CAD drawings are now finalized, and he is building a prototype to test this spring.

“The prototype will be ready by planting season,” said Meyer.

“I’m looking forward to giving it a go in the field. It’s exciting to find out what works and what needs to be improved.”

Meyer is well-seasoned to the entrepreneurial process, having designed his patented TiltSpear Double Bale Spear for tractors and payloaders.

“The user can move bales 25% faster than with a conventional double spear,” said Meyer. “I also worked with a small startup company, Agriculture Concepts, helping design a product called Tracktill. Tracktill is designed to help eliminate pinch row compaction caused by planter and tractor wheels that can greatly reduce yields.” Yetter Farm Equipment Company purchased the license to Tracktill.

“I’ve also had several failures,” said Meyer, “and, honestly, the more I’ve gotten used to it, the better risks I’ve taken — the more I consider mistakes part of the process leading to success. If I’m not making mistakes, then I’m not working hard enough to end up with a great product.”

For now, however, Meyer is focusing on his new planter.

“I’m excited for the possibilities, what it can do not only for me, but other farmers,” said Meyer. “You’re either improving or standing still, and I prefer to move.” transmission and injury. But this scenario proves to be more difficult when it comes to checking the moms, capturing the calves and assisting with births. It’s also nearly impossible to provide shelter and protection in the event of a sudden storm or a drastic drop in temperature. “Confined outdoor pens with cement or packed rock or lime as a base would obviously help prevent mud but would require bedding to create a safe, comfortable, warm environment for calving,” Clark said. “Bedding would still become saturated with manure and urine, plus would be exposed to precipitation so regular cleaning and re-bedding would be important. Cost is a factor here as well, as cement is expensive. A compromise might be to put cement under feeding areas but not necessarily under entire pens.”

If a farmer has the space available, it’s ideal to rotate cattle into cleaner, drier pens when an area becomes muddy and compounded by manure and urine. But Clark cautioned cattle producers against turning cow-calf pairs out to pasture too soon. While that helps spread out the herd and moves them into cleaner settings, it also can pose problems.

"One is that pastures may not yet be ready to graze and may be very wet themselves. This creates the risk of reducing pasture productivity by grazing too early and damaging the wet ground," Clark said. "The other problem is that newborns still arrive into a muddy and often, pathogen-contaminated environment.”

Instead, producers could consider implementing a modified Sandhills Calving System by cycling the remaining pregnant females into a new calving area instead of pasture ground inhabited by older animals.

Producers should first consider if they have enough land or pen space for this option and are able to check on the herd, capture calves and assist with births if the heifers are spread out across several pens or fields. Also critical is ensuring there’s adequate water and fencing options.

“Moving pregnant cows to a cleaner, drier environment can work well to protect newborn calves in certain situations. There should be less risk of chilled calves and dirty udders and stuff like that. And the new calving area will not be contaminated with pathogens being shed by older calves,” he said.

Cattle producers know to check their herd often, but it’s especially important when conditions are muddy. “When we are talking about things like hypothermia and failure of passive transfer, the earlier we can intervene the better,” Clark said. “Early intervention can be valuable to help calves get going and ensure colostrum consumption.”

While it’s ideal to check every hour or two, especially as cows progress during the second stage of labor, which normally takes 30 minutes for cows and upwards of an hour for heifers, it isn’t necessarily feasible for lots of farmers.

“I’ve seen some recommendations or rules of thumb to check every three to four hours. Many producers are checking more like once or twice a day according to the NAHMS survey. There is a growing use of barn cameras that can feed surveillance video right to your TV, computer or phone. This technology can be tremendously helpful by allowing producers to keep an eye on things while doing something else or even being away from the farm,” Clark said. “It also helps with night checks — it’s much more fun to get up and quickly check the camera than to bundle up and go do a manual check every time.”

Another strategy might be to use the Konefal feeding method to promote calving at a certain time of day, Clark suggested.

“The idea here is to feed in the evening, which promotes more calves being born during the day. Although, for producers who work day jobs, they may not gain a whole lot by promoting day calving if they are away from the farm and unable to watch and assist during those daylight hours,” Clark said.

He reminds producers that muddy conditions can beef up the energy requirements for cattle, too. More calories are burned as cattle trudge through thick and deep mud, pushing their energy requirements upward by as much as 30 percent.

“This time of year I often emphasize the importance of sufficient nutrition to support adequate body condition score at calving and meet the increasing requirements of third trimester and early lactation, he said.

"It is critical for health and performance of cow and calf that the diet is balanced to meet the greater energy requirements of challenging environmental conditions.”

In fact, some cattle will avoid eating because they don’t want to have to exert the extra energy required to sludge through the muck and mud to reach their feed. It’s wise to manage the conditions around the feeding area and make sure a suitable path can be navigated from loafing areas to feeding areas.

"There's no question that most of these suggestions are easier said than done, but investing effort in these areas can reap great rewards with greater calf survival, health and performance," Clark said.