Machines

Air Stream Selector: The Weather Is Now Curated

For two decades, prairie manufacturers have argued over which air stream a seed falls into. The newest answer adds a processor, and it lands upstream of the real mess.

Clay-diorama editorial illustration of an adjustable tabletop fan and a potted plant.

What changes in this design

Without this kind of selector, a reader might expect incoming material to follow a single available route.

Here, a rotatable drum directs material arriving at one inlet toward whichever one of two air-flow outlet chutes is selected.

It makes the basic routing choice clear: material entering through one inlet can head toward either of two air-flow chutes.

The lever on the Fenix III meter

On the metering system fitted to the current Precision Delivery air carts, there is a lever. Pulling it swings the diverter plates together and sends whatever is falling out of the tank into either the seeding tube or the fertiliser tube. That is the whole mechanism, to my mind. One hand, one motion, and a few hundred bushels of product change destination.

The carts these levers sit on are not small. The range runs from about 400 bushels up to 1,350, and the tanks are split unevenly on purpose. The largest cart divides into 93, 652, 393 and 213 bushels, with an optional fifth bin on top. Four compartments, two air streams. Every combination of what goes where is a decision someone makes before the field, then commits to with a lever.

Yorkton, 1949 to 2020

The question of which air stream gets the seed is old, and it is largely Saskatchewan's. In June 2003 a manufacturer there filed on adjustable diverter valves in each passage, able to send product to an upper collection zone, a lower one, or both, so a machine could run single-shoot or double-shoot. Five inventors are named on it. It granted in December 2004.

That company entered creditor protection in January 2020 citing a liquidity crisis, was bought out of it that July, and its Yorkton plant closed at the end of the year after 71 years of operation. Seventy jobs went. Morris Industries patented the first version of this valve and did not survive to build the next one, which I find a sobering part of the record.

A patent that argues against mechanism

The next serious answer came from a different direction. One Pass Implements holds a 2020 patent whose background reads as a complaint about exactly the approach above: a complex multitude of diverter valves with complex linkage between them, all of which must be aligned properly and adjusted carefully. Its fix was to remove the moving parts. A stationary shaped diverter, reversed by hand, feeds the left or the right conveying line, and that is the whole of it. Two neighbours, seventeen years apart, reaching opposite conclusions about the same fitting, a contrast I find telling.

A drum with a processor behind it

Which brings me to the filing I sat down with. US20260231853A1, Air Stream Selector, published 13 August 2026, assigned to Väderstad Industries and naming Jordan Esau and Gert Gilstring. The application went in on 7 February 2024 and claims priority to a provisional from February 2023. It is still pending.

The device is a rotatable drum that takes material from one inlet and routes it to a selected one of two air-flow outlet chutes. Its classifications put it in pneumatic seeders and distributor heads, so this is a seeder part and not a general-purpose valve. The drum is turned by a processor. That is the content: the lever becomes a command, and a rival's argument for fewer parts gets answered with more parts plus software.

It isn't a leap from nowhere. Sectional control on the same maker's Canadian line already runs engage and disengage lookaheads of up to thirty seconds, to account for the time product spends travelling down the air stream. Timing granular product through pneumatic plumbing is already a software problem on these machines. Whether it helps a farmer depends on something duller: whether it speaks the ISOBUS standard behind whatever tractor is pulling it.

The harder half of the problem

Here is what makes me hesitate. A 2023 test-bench study of a 16-coulter pneumatic drill measured how evenly oat seed actually reached the rows. The best case was a coefficient of variation of 26.28% and lateral unevenness of 24.42%, at 14.4 m/s air velocity. Slower air was worse: 30.37% at 12.2 m/s. Tilting the head ten degrees off vertical took it to 33.61%.

Those numbers come from the distributor head, which sits immediately downstream of any selector. So you can position the drum perfectly and a quarter to a third of the variation between rows is reintroduced a metre later. The precision arrives upstream of the mess rather than at it.

I don't think that makes the filing wrong. Automating the lever removes a step and lets routing change mid-field, which no lever can. But the same company is also selling a machine that meters each seed individually at the row unit, gives up central pneumatic distribution altogether, and publishes wheat trial figures for it that are hard to wave away. One of those fixes the fraction of the problem that is left. The other goes at where the problem always was.

Sources

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

The record, briefly. US20260231853A1, “Air Stream Selector” The abstract describes a rotatable selector drum that routes material from one inlet toward a selected one of two air-flow outlet chutes.

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