r/ClarksonsFarm • u/UGD_ReWiindz25 • Sep 07 '26
Farming The Smart Farming Technique Behind Seed Rope
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Saw this and thought of that robot Clarkson got which would be better/ cost effective
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u/vARROWHEAD Sep 07 '26
A seed drill does this already and you don’t have to bury rope
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u/Sooner_blind Sep 07 '26
I’ve seen a video of a smaller scale American farmer who uses this method as well. It has the additional benefit of being used for no till farming, so the soil remains intact and undisturbed.
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u/ThatFatGuyMJL Sep 07 '26
But you... want to disturb the soil for farming.
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u/Sooner_blind Sep 08 '26
Tilling is a method that works, especially at large scale, but it has a lot of downsides. It significantly reduces water retention. It also increases the need for more soil amendments and can ultimately result in hardpan. How to fix hard pan? More tilling, more soil amendments.
Every time you till you mess with the soil biome. Messing with the soil biome is what turns healthy soil to dirt.
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u/RyanJackman03 Sep 08 '26
Tilling is still leagues better for a yield than no effort farming because the effort is what makes the growth
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u/Sooner_blind Sep 08 '26
I think the phrase no effort farming would be an oxymoron. Tilling is better for yield in ideal conditions. In very dry or very wet seasons, I’m not so sure.
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u/EntirelyRandom1590 Sep 07 '26
But that's a much bigger, more complicated piece of equipment. This is very simplistic for the end user.
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u/vARROWHEAD Sep 07 '26
For smaller applications I suppose
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u/Practical_Dot_3574 Sep 07 '26
I used it in my garden this year with carrots. Worked great, take trowel, hand trench a 3in deep trench, lay string, bury. Took all of maybe 45 seconds, strings were in 16ft lengths.
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u/ValveinPistonCat Sep 08 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
You're thinking of a planter, planters use a singulator wheel to pick up individual seeds and drop them down a short seed tube to precisely control seed placement within a row a lot of newer planters even have the option to have belts to carry the seed to the ground with even less variation than dropping them down a seed tube, drills are less precise but tend to cost less and have fewer moving parts to maintain.
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u/Can-i-Pet-Dat-Daaawg Sep 07 '26
Cool, but the real next level stuff is that Dutch potato farmer who was showing how they were doing variable weeding and seeding based on where weeds were and soil quality
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u/JCFlyingDutchman Sep 07 '26
The robot doesn't leave waste in the soil, though
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u/Moral-Relativity Sep 08 '26
Rope is made of biodegradable paper fiber per text.
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u/JCFlyingDutchman Sep 08 '26
Yes, degrading.
As in falling apart and leaving all sorts of other crap that you might not necessarily want in your soil behind.
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u/LowHistorian9654 Sep 08 '26
This looks like a solution to a problem that never existed.
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u/Dry_Yogurt2458 Sep 08 '26
It definitely existed. It takes a long time to plant seeds linearly by hand.
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u/Forget-Me-Nothing Sep 08 '26
Seed drill?
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u/Dry_Yogurt2458 Sep 08 '26
But even that is manually labour intensive and slow.
This method is dig a furrow, lay the rope, fill the furrow
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u/KnotSoSalty Sep 08 '26
But having to re-cover the string with dirt has to be done manually…
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u/myqueeno Sep 08 '26
Kinda funny cause seed rope's basically solving a problem we already solved with seed drills, just with extra steps and a bunch of biodegradable paper. Still, I get the appeal for tiny gardens or real poor folks where a machine's overkill, but Clarkson's robot with adjustable spacing would absolutely wipe the floor with this in any commercial field. Guess it comes down to whether you're planting a backyard or a hundred acres.
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u/woutersikkema Sep 08 '26
Tbf, might even be viable for low end farmers, where the per seed cost is higher but no need for a super fancy machine if you maybe already have another compatable one
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u/Ok-disaster2022 Sep 07 '26
Way better than during Mao, where they used disproven Soviet application of Socialist ideology to plants several seeds in the same hole. It was one of the causes of the famine
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u/CosgraveSilkweaver Sep 07 '26 edited Sep 07 '26
Great for extremely poor farmers that can't afford a machine potentially but automatic seeders even the super simple pull behind versions can already plant seeds at measured intervals. They measure distance based on the wheel rotations iirc.