ASABE S658 PLANTER TEST STANDARD: 1. ROW UNIT TEST

The advancements in precision planting technologies have far exceeded the capabilities of some of the industry-accepted test procedures developed over 30 years ago to describe the performance of singulated planting equipment. A new standard (ASABE S658, ASABE Standards, 2024a, 2024b, and 2024c) for evaluating planter seed spacing performance has been published. This voluntary test standard is composed of three parts, two of which relate to the topic of this article: S658-1, Singulating Seeding Equipment Test Methods Part 1: General Information (ASABE Standards, 2024a), and S658-3, Singulating Seeding Equipment Test Methods Part 3: Seed Spacing Performance (ASABE Standards, 2024c) The Standard includes both new measurements to improve the accuracy of seed-spacing data and new performance measures to describe seed-spacing distributions better. In addition to the nuts and bolts of testing procedures and analysis in the Standard document, ASABE hosts Excel workbooks that do all the calculations, plot graphs, and enter the results into the report formats. This article also includes a discussion of concerns the working group had during the development of this Standard.