Field Notes

A Seed Meter With a Tiny Sense of Theater

Ag Leader lost $16.2 million over a seed-delivery belt; its newest filing reaches high speed without one, and the yield evidence is thin either way.

Clay-diorama editorial illustration of a seed-meter wheel beside a model field.

What changes in this design

A reader may picture seeds simply being released and falling downward. That is a simple starting picture; ordinary planting methods are not otherwise explained here.

Here, seed release is handled by a meter in a setup that also includes a downward delivery tube, an adaptor, moving air, and a crowder brush. Together, these parts are included to support high-speed planting, although their detailed roles are not stated.

This matters because it frames the invention as a full planting setup rather than only the part that releases seeds. It also makes the aim clear: support for planting at high speed, even though many working details remain unstated.

Fifteen feet a second, and a seed in free fall

A corn planter running at 10 miles an hour covers about 15 feet every second. Somewhere above the furrow a seed leaves a spinning metering disc, drops down a plastic tube, hits the walls on the way, and lands where it lands. Drive faster and the scatter gets worse, which I find unsurprising.

A five-year Iowa State study found conventional vacuum meters exceeding 10% skips at 10 mph once you count both meter error and tube bounce, while purpose-built high-speed systems held skips low at every speed tested. So the industry stopped dropping seed and started carrying it. Flighted belts take seed off the disc to soil level and release it backwards at roughly the tractor's forward speed, so it meets the ground at nearly zero relative velocity.

A belt, and a $16.2 million verdict

Ag Leader sells one. Its SureSpeed advertises the lowest release point in the industry and seed placed "just as accurately at 3 mph as it is at 12 mph." Deere got there first on paper. A Deere patent with a February 2009 priority date claims a brush belt carrying seed to ground level at a horizontal velocity matching planter forward speed. Its background blames spacing variation on how seeds exit the meter and fall through the tube, worsening with speed.

On 30 October 2023 a jury in the Southern District of Iowa found that SureSpeed and a competitor's similar product infringed four claims of Deere patents. The award was $2,107,000 in lost profits plus $14,220,900 in royalties, $16,227,900 in all. Infringement was found not willful, and the defendants failed to invalidate any asserted patent. Five months later the suits were dismissed and Deere licensed its planting technology, so both products returned to market. Ag Leader's flagship now ships under licence from the company that sued it, which I find striking.

Eighteen days after the Federal Circuit ruled

On 24 January 2025 the Federal Circuit affirmed a different outcome: a jury had found that AGCO's SpeedTube does not infringe two Deere patents covering the same ground. The distinction that mattered was narrow. Deere's claims cover capturing the seed; AGCO argued its system instead projects and accelerates it.

Eighteen days after that affirmance, on 11 February 2025, Ag Leader lodged a provisional titled "Seed Meter." The full application followed a year later, published 13 August 2026, sole inventor Alan F. Barry. Its stated purpose: run high-speed meters on conventional gravity drop tubes without losing population, spacing or precision. Inside: a positive air flow source that accelerates seed off the disc and turns its path from horizontal to vertical, a crowder brush that pushes seed against the housing wall, an ejector wheel that breaks the vacuum's hold, and a drop-tube adaptor with vent holes, made of bounce-dampening material. Airflow varies with ground speed. There is no belt in it.

I can't infer a motive from the timing. And air delivery isn't new. A Swedish planter maker already sells a system that guides seed from meter to soil on positive air pressure at 8 to 12 mph, and advertises it as removing the need for extra motors, belts or brushes.

Zero to three bushels an acre

Here is what I find unsettling. The same Iowa State work put the yield advantage of high-speed planting at 0 to 3 bushels an acre in corn and 0 to 2 in soybeans, and said it isn't guaranteed to appear at all in a single year. The authors put the real money elsewhere: 3 to 5% yield loss per week past the optimal planting window, roughly $6,000 a year on a thousand acres. Speed pays because it buys days.

The rows may matter less than everyone assumed. A Purdue review found about 2.2 bushels an acre lost per inch of increase in plant-to-plant spacing standard deviation, with other trials at 2.5 and 3.4, but Wisconsin and Ontario work from the same period found the effect negligible, and a later Ontario paper landed at 1.5. There was also no shared yardstick. The ASABE group behind the S658 seeding-equipment test standards formed because standardized evaluation methods were missing, to reduce ambiguity when manufacturers report results.

Where the risk actually sits

The filing looks sensible to me. Losing the belt takes motors, a reinforced conveyor and a wear item off every row unit, and the grower keeps the tubes already on the planter. That is a real benefit whatever the legal weather.

The risk, as I see it, is that this category has been shaped more by claim language than by field data. The measured gain is small and contested, the vendor pages carry almost no numbers, and the test standard arrived after the lawsuits did. If the next planter generation turns on the difference between capturing a seed and accelerating one, that is a line a court drew, not one a corn plant knows about.

Sources

Reporting for this piece drew on the published filing and the references below.

The record, briefly. US20260231850A1, “Agricultural Seed Meter and Related Devices, Systems, and Methods” The abstract describes a seed-meter system that combines a meter, gravity delivery tube, adaptor, air flow, and crowder brush to support high-speed planting.

More angles on this

The Seed Method's Extremely Serious Fresh StartAnother reading from the same A01C classification family, planting; sowing; fertilising.
Seeds Are Being Asked to Land With IntentionAnother reading from the same A01C classification family, planting; sowing; fertilising.
CPC A01C: Planting; sowing; fertilisingThe official classification family this record was filed into, published in the USPTO Cooperative Patent Classification scheme.
The Leveling Bar Has a Very Firm Opinion About LevelAnother reading from the neighbouring A01B classification family, soil working in agriculture or forestry.
Confectionery, Seen Through the Eyes of a Tiny MuseumAnother reading from the wider A23G classification family, cocoa.

Read around this one:Public patent record USPTO published figure Patent issue-date index