Neil from Messick's here, to show you the Land Pride OS1572 slit seeder. There's only a handful of implements out there on the market that I would sit and make this statement, that there's anyone in particular that simply the gold standard, the one that's better than everybody else. Generally, there's enough competition between these companies that there's a lot of things that contend for that title. But in the case of this thing, this is one implement that I can say, I believe really stands head and shoulders above the others. Has for decades, and has kind of a really epic place out there in the landscaping community when it comes to the gold standard of slit seeders. So I'm going to show you around this implement here, show you some of the options that you can order these things with, how they can come equipped, and how one works.

So we're going to start up here in the seeding assembly itself. There are some options on this unit, but this kind of core orange portion here in the middle is going to be the same, regardless of how you order this thing through. The seed cups, and the main seed assembly here, kind of your seedbox, and the top half of this unit, is going to share a lot of pieces with Land Pride's Great Plains Division. Land Pride and Great Plains are related companies, both owned by Kubota as being the parent company overall. And these pieces are field-tested in the agricultural space. Great Plains is a significant company in the ag seeding space, and you're going to find seed cups and seed components in the top end of this piece, coming out of the Great Plains Division. The small seed box here, the top is no exception to that, it's fundamentally a box. But you're going to find kind of time-tested stuff up here in the top half of the unit. This is a seeder that's capable of putting down seed into all kinds of different areas. You can use it for both over-seeding or for seeding new lawns, or new pastures, whatever you like. You're going to find here in the bottom side of the lid would be a rate chart, the pounds per acre, or pounds per thousand square feet that you're going to put down into a given area of all kinds of different products.

So they would've gone through and done some testing with these things so that you know you're putting this stuff down at an accurate rate. If you notice over here, these are going to come through with markers for high and low. There's an actual gearing that can be changed out depending on what range you'd like these numbers to run in. There's an end sprocket over here that can be set up that chooses what column you run in. So this one's set up right now is in high range where the tooth sprocket is, if you need to flip it, you just remove a side cover and then flip a sprocket around. 

 So I'm going to be planning a fescue, a fescue fine blade turf type, which you'd find right on here at right about six pounds per acre. So I follow this off of my chart over here to find that I should have my setting at 50. If I come back here to the back of the machine, I've got a little lever here that I can slide back and forth. This is a gate that changes the amount that's exposed for the top of the seed cup here, which is going to change the rate that that seed falls through. 

This is something that matters, because when you're seeding of any kind of significant quantity, that you're going to know that grass seed is actually fairly expensive. The stuff that I'm going to be putting down today is about a $100 for a 50 pound bag. One advice that I could give you when it comes to buying that grass seed is not to buy seed from a box store. Any kind of those places where they have really heavy pricing pressure, you're going to find generally poor quality power equipment, poor quality grass seed. Kind of stuff's not going to be as good as what you're going to find from a farm store or a landscape supply house. 

So the grass seed that I'm planning today, doesn't include a lot of annual grasses or weed content. It's a better quality seed. And I didn't pay a whole lot more for it than what you would pay at the Home Depot or a place like that. And I would lump Tractor Supply under that box store type place as well. Any of  those mass merchants, they're not really selling those high quality products, and where you're going to be putting things down in precision in something like this, it's better to spend a little bit of extra money or take the extra time to drive a little bit further, to get to the right supplier for your product that you're putting down.

There are really four things that you're going to consider when you order one of these things when it comes to options in sizing. The first is going to be with, this is the most popular model here. It's a six foot. You can also get these down the 48 inch models, for a four foot as well. This one's going to come through with all the different options on it. This is the one that we generally run in our rental fleet, which is kind of the best equipped version of it.

These lights up here in the top can come through as an option. If you're a landscaper and say, you're traveling with your tractor from site to site and you need to have safety lighting. You can order these lights on it for the factory and plug that lighting into the back of your tractor to get power in order to put these things on if you're traveling down the road, any kind of distance. Probably the most important option to pay attention to is this rear pack or roller. In the case of this unit here, when this roller turns, that's what operates the mechanical mechanism that feeds the seed through the seed cups.

The PTO that's coming off of your tractor does not run the seeding mechanism. The PTO runs the slit seeder mechanism in the bottom. That spinning drum that cuts the grooves and stuff into your ground, so that the seed falls down into those grooves for good seed to soil contact, and to prevent a little bit of erosion, if you get some water washing across it. So the PTO runs the slit seeder, but the roller in the back runs the seed cups.

Now the roller can be done in two different ways. This is the more expensive version of the roller, where the roller itself turning across the entire width of the back of the unit is what drives the seed cup. So any place, if you're driving across a crowned area, that crown, regardless of where the implement is hitting it, is going to cause the seed cups in order to rotate and drop seed. The less expensive way of ordering this through is with an end drive wheel, where you simply have a wheel sitting on the end of the unit and that end drive wheel turning is what operates the seed mechanism.

What you want to watch out for there is that crown that I was talking about. If you run that version of this seeder across that crowned area, you may find that you stop dropping seed at places that that end drive roller comes off the ground. This more expensive version of the rear drive roller, for me, is usually standard equipment for us. We're going to order that on every one of these, because we feel it mechanically is a much better way in order to operate the unit, but it is a little bit more costly.

I have an option on the front side of the seeder as well. So this is a large front roller. Now, as you drive along, this roller is going to be there in order to pack and to smooth the soil as you drive across it. The slit cutting mechanism that's in there, doesn't do a whole lot in order to pack or distribute the soils as you go. Now I've run a preparator out here to get this area ready for seeding. So the coursework has already been done of cleaning away the rocks and smoothing everything out. But the little ruts and stuff that I have between passes, I'm not going to need to go through with a rake and smooth them out because when I drive through with the seeder, that front roller is going to take care of cleaning up those areas, so it gives me less prep work to do by having that installed on the front of the machine.

Now, in terms of the tractor to run this implement, this thing is quite heavy. You'll hear me talk a lot, when we talk about tractors on this channel, that the three point hitch specification on your tractor is not one that I pay a whole lot of attention to because there's very few implements out there that really are going to push that spec on a tractor. Most implements, if you're sizing them properly to your machine, virtually any tractor is going to be able to lift up. This is one though, that is awfully heavy. There are machines out there that you're sometimes going to size 72 inch rear implements too, that this thing is really going to push.

I own an LX3310 Kubota as well. It will hook up to this. It will pick it up and move it. I have done it before. However, it is absolutely not fun. It's one of those cases where you got so much weight on that three point hitch, that it's almost hard to keep your front tires down. And at times I'd find myself even having a hard time making end turns and that kind of stuff to come back around, and actually getting traction on those front tires to make a turn. This thing comes through, it's 1,650 pounds the way that I have it set up here today. My 3310 lifts 1,675. It would fit up. It would work. It would do it.

But in this case, having a little bit bigger tractor is very advantageous. It's much, much nicer to run. And I would generally look for a little bit smaller implement. While I buy 60 and 72 inch implements for my tractor, I would buy the 48 version of this that comes through at like 1,200 pounds, rather than going for this one at 1,600 pounds, because it's going to be much nicer to operate. Again, most implements aren't going to push that three point hitch, but this is one that really has got a lot of meat in it and really does it. It can push a lot of tractors. So I'm out here with our rental MX series machine today.

So we put this in here. We're going to want to work across the seed box. I'm just doing this one bag right now. I'm just going to work from end to end to make sure that we get a roughly equal amount of seed from one end of the box to the other. Now there is a stirring mechanism up here in the top that makes sure that the seed gets stirred up and doesn't bridge. But still you want to be smart when you pour this in and kind of spread it out from one side to the other.

So if you look closely here, you can see this thing leaves a very defined finish. You have the grooves here about every inch and a half or so, where that slit seeder goes through and cuts, mounds it up a little bit and then attempts to drop the seed down into the grooves. That gives you good seed to soil contact there as the thing goes along. I like the front roller that's on that. Like I said, this thing weighs 1,600 pounds. So with that extra roller on the front and the drive roller on the back and the packer roller on the front, it does a good job of smoothing the ground as you go along. 

This particular spot in front of me right here, I had left a pile of dirt really, when I came through with my preparator, and went through and kind of cleaned this area up for seeding. I had dumped an area of spoils right here. And for you, I went and just drove right over top of it to see how it would finish. So this lump of dirt that was left here, you can see was pushed really flat by the seeder when it went over top of it. And you can see the remains that are here, but it did a pretty good job of hiding some of that stuff as I went over top of it.

And I think that's something that's important to know as a landscaper, if you're coming through and you're doing this kind of work commercially. It's not necessarily needed to go through and get things like rake smooth if you're going to broadcast something down with your hand, when you could take something like this and drive it over top of it and smooth everything out and drop the seed all in one pass. It's a lot more efficient. 

I like how this has gotten the seed to soil contact. So now my next step that I'm going to do here in the next video is to come through here with a hydroseeder and use that paper and glue solution to glue all of this down and have the paper to give a little bit more moisture to my seed, because I'm doing this in June. I'm a little late into the season now to be seeding. If you didn't do this with hydroseeder like I'm going to, you'll often would want to come through here with a straw blower or put some straw or something down in order to try to prevent that erosion. So in a situation like this, where you're doing a new lawn, you've got another step to do after this in order to make sure this soil doesn't just wash away or make a puddle of your seeds over here somewhere. 

And in over seeding scenario like we did up here in this higher grass, you got nothing to do after that. And that's where I've actually used this thing in the past, on my other tractor in a different lawn. I went through and over seeded. And that's a one pass job. Flip the machine on, drive over top of everything. And that existing grass is going to hold everything in place so it doesn't wash off. Fantastic piece for doing either new lawns or over seeding. Two other spots here to give you an example of what the finished product may look like here, depending on what your exact application is. 

To your right here, is an area that I would've gone through with an FFC prep rater, a turf prep tool. And going over top of and taking a bunch of the clover and stuff off the top and kind of got this area ready for seed and then took the seeder over top of it. And you could see it does a pretty good job between those two tools of removing a lot of the existing turf that was here, and then cutting the new turf in. On the other side, here is an area that was really almost an agricultural field filled with clover, where I would've gone through and then over seeded over top of that. And you can see here how it goes through kind of chops some of the clover vines and everything up and then gets that seed through the vines and through the leaves and down to the soil to a place that it can germinate. 

So that's a little bit of my time out here with the Land Pride seeder. I'm going to be using this to do about an acre and a half of turf seeding today, and pretty happy with how the results are coming out. I've got a lot to do out here yet, but it's really impressive after coming out and doing a little bit of turf prep and running over top with this. Things are coming along pretty nicely. And I'm happy with the work that I'm able to get done out here. I'm a guy who gets to run a lot of equipment, but by no means a professional at running a lot of these things, and I'm coming out with a pretty nice looking result pretty quickly.

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