Field Notes

Volume Is the Seed Meter's Love Language

Three weeks after a second round of Iowa layoffs, a planter maker patented a kit that turns the machine a farmer already owns into a grain drill.

Clay-diorama editorial illustration of a metering drum and seed cups.

What changes in this design

Before considering the change, think of a seed meter as the planter component that controls how planting material is released. The starting point here is an air seed meter.

Here, the air seed meter is adapted with a replacement disk and a different operating direction to portion different seed types by volume.

It helps a reader connect the changes to their stated purpose: portioning different seed types by volume.

Fifty-three jobs in Williamsburg, Iowa

On January 15, 2025, a planter maker in Williamsburg, Iowa cut 53 jobs from a workforce of about 550. It was the second round at that plant in five months; roughly 200 people had gone the previous August. The company's president attributed it to the continued downturn in the agricultural market.

Three weeks later, on February 5, 2025, the same company filed a provisional patent application. The full filing published this August, and I've been thinking about it since. It describes a way to turn a planter a farmer already owns into a different machine.

A disk with paddles, turning the wrong way

The company is Kinze Manufacturing, privately held, founded in 1965 as a repair shop and moved to Williamsburg in 1976. Its identity is row-crop planters: a rear-folding 24-row machine in 1975, a 36-row in 2004, an electric-drive planter in 2013.

The new application is titled for a volumetric seed meter, and a retro-fit version of one. Air seed meters handle corn and soybeans; drills handle cereals like wheat and oats. The filing proposes swapping the meter's disk for one with paddles and running the meter in the opposite direction, converting it from picking up one seed at a time to moving seed by the scoopful. The stated aim is quick and easy changes to plant different seed types. The lead inventor is Matthew Wilhelmi.

The decade of hardware this switches off

That name matters. Wilhelmi is lead inventor on the 2013 patent for the vacuum disc this retrofit replaces, the one with flow-directing pockets to break up stagnant seed pools, a chamfered edge to stop seeds ricocheting, dual adjustable cutoff blades. He is also first-named on a 2018 patent for a delivery system where a brush wheel hands each seed to a flighted belt that sets it in the furrow with almost no horizontal speed relative to the ground, so it can't bounce or roll out of position.

That's a great deal of engineering aimed at one seed at a time. The new filing's contribution is a disk that deliberately doesn't do it. Same engineer, ten years apart. I don't read that as a contradiction. I read it as a company looking hard at what it can still sell.

A forty-six dollar plate already on the shelf

Here's the complication. An aftermarket supplier sells drop-in plates under the SeedRight name, $46 each, that let existing vacuum and brush-type planters, some Kinze meters among them, plant wheat, cereal rye, triticale and oats, with small-seed versions for radish and turnip. Not everything the filing covers, but a lot of it, at a price a farmer can put on a card.

Volumetric metering is also a downgrade in a specific way. These systems meter by volume, so two lots of the same crop that differ in seed size deliver different amounts at the same setting. The fix is physical calibration: catch the seed, weigh it, drive a measured distance. Extension guidance for a ten-foot drill puts that at 435 feet for a tenth of an acre, and advises staying under 4 mph. Precision planting of wheat does test well - depth uniformity improved by up to 60% in Michigan State research, spacing by about 20%, worth roughly 10% more yield - but the researchers' own view was that higher yield alone may not persuade a farmer to give up a drill that works.

Wheat at a 107-year low

Then there's the market it points at. USDA's spring 2026 survey put all-wheat planted area at 43.8 million acres, down 3% and the lowest since the records begin in 1919. Winter wheat down 2%, spring wheat down 6%, durum down 11%.

The machinery side is worse. Full-year 2025 US sales, as tallied by the equipment makers' trade association: tractors over 100 horsepower down 22%, four-wheel-drive tractors down 41%, self-propelled combines down 35%. The four-wheel-drive drop went from about 4% in 2024 to over 40% a year later.

Where this leaves things

You can't sell many new planters into that. You might be able to sell a box of parts.

That's what I think this filing is, and I don't mean it as a criticism. It's a narrow, honest piece of engineering that accepts the machine already in the shed is the last one that farm is buying for a while, and asks what else it could be made to do. It's still pending, and nothing cites it yet. Whether it becomes a product depends on things no drawing controls: whether it beats a $46 plate by enough to charge for, and whether anyone wants more cereal acres.

What stays with me is the timing. Three weeks after a layoff, an engineer who spent a decade teaching a machine to place seeds one at a time filed for a way to make it stop.

Sources

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

The record, briefly. US20260223765A1, “Volumetric Seed Meter and Retro-Fit Volumetric Seed Meter for Agricultural Planting Implement” The abstract describes adapting an air seed meter with a replacement disk and a different operating direction so it can meter different seed types volumetrically.

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