By RAY WYCHE
Staff Writer

In the spring planting season, time is money to those who tend the soil.

A local company has recently installed a seed-loading system that will not only serve to save precious time for the farmer during his busy spring days but offers other advantages related to getting his spring plantings done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Carolina Eastern of Whiteville on U. S. 701 North now has an NK TruBulk Brand soybean seed delivery system completed and ready to operate when soybean planting time, from April to June, rolls around during what is probably the farmer’s busiest season.

Scott Hooks of Carolina Eastern says the system has advantages other than speeding up the process of getting seed from supplier to farmer. The TruBulk delivery system places the chosen amount of seed in the farmer’s container, be it a truck body or “tender,” a trailer than can be pulled directly into the field, eliminating manual labor involved in handling bagged seed.

“It’s much faster on Carolina Eastern and the farmer,” Hooks says, “and there’s no waste from broken bags. There’s no disposal (of empty bags) problem.”

The TruBulk system consists of three tall, gleaming white silo storage bins, each holding 3,000 bushels of seed. The seed are unloaded into the silos from the seed dealers’ trucks by long-reach conveyors, and from the silos into the farmer’s truck or tender by a smaller conveyor system.

Delivery of seed to the grower is fast and accurate, and the farmer has his seed in a conveyance that can be transported directly to the field.

“Most farmers use tenders,” Hooks says, avoiding the handling of bagged seed.

Carolina Eastern will continue to sell soybean and other farm crop seed in bags for those growers who prefer bags to bulk.

“We put the system in to give the farmer an option,” he says.

The large silos were manufactured in Illinois and delivered by specially equipped trucks to the Carolina Eastern site. The lowboy trailers on which the three big bins were carried were equipped to tilt the big silos upright onto pre-prepared concrete slabs.

For the past four years Columbus County farmers have been increasing their acreages planted in soybeans, partly because of the continued reduction in tobacco allotments before all tobacco quota controls were removed in 2004.

But Hooks and other farm-related observers are predicting a drop in soybeans plantings this year, due mainly to a dramatic increase in the price of corn during the past few years.

“This year it will be the opposite,” Hooks says. “There’ll be more corn planted.”

About two weeks ago No. 2 yellow corn on the Chadbourn Grain Market was selling for $4.26 per bushel compared to an average price for the entire year of 2006 of $2.34 per bushel.

Soybean plantings in Columbus County increased from 52,142 acres in 2003 to 61,474 last year, according to the Federal Crop Report.

Last year, county farmers grew 30,668 acres of corn, up from 28,312 acres in 2003. The 2007 corn crop is expected to show a large increase if the higher prices are in effect at planting time later in the spring.

The rise in corn prices is due to expectations of an additional market for corn for use in production of ethanol as an alternate fuel to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign petroleum.

The majority of the nation’s corn is produced in Midwestern states, and the surge in use of corn in ethanol experiments and production is expected to result in a rise in livestock feed prices.

At present, corn appears to be the most efficient grain for producing ethanol, according to experiments.

Soybean growers will also plant fewer seed per acre, if they follow the recommendations of N.C. State University soybean specialist Dr. Jim Dunphy. Dunphy, in cooperation with Extension Service agents throughout the state, has found that farmers can obtain as large a harvest by planting fewer seeds. Prior to the study, Farmers typically planted about 200,000 seeds per acre.

The new recommended seeding rates cut this figure by about 24 percent with no loss in yield, the study showed.

Soybeans are the third most valuable field crop in the state, trailing only tobacco and cotton.