The ‘Modern’ Way to Haul Soybean Seed

You probably heard about me stopping by Wayne O'Connor's and picking up 25 bags of soybean seed. Yes, we put all 25 bags in my 1999 Monte Carlo. The "modern" way to haul soybean seed is to use a seed tender. Wayne gets seed delivered in bulk. Dealers today have a number of bins (different bins for each variety) that seed is unloaded into. Seed is then moved from the bin into the seed tender and hauled out to the planter in the field.  If a farmer wants a fungicide or insecticide applied to the soybean seed they can do it right on the farm as the seed comes out of the bulk bin.

I only have 110 acres of beans to plant, so I do it the old-fashioned way -- getting my beans in a 50-pound bag. The seed tenders do save a lot of work if you are a real farmer. Imagine you are planting with a 24-row planter and it will take 36 bags to fill it, or a central fill planter that might hold more than 100 bags of seed. You can probably plant 30 acres an hour, so in three hours you need to fill the planter again. That's a lot of 50-pound bags to carry to the planter in one day. This is why we have bulk seed available and seed tenders.