Ep. 225 - Monosem Planters: Built-to-Order Solutions for Every Operation
·21 min
1. Agriculture Technology Podcast Episode 225 focuses on Monosem planters and the company’s built-to-order approach for U.S. and global growers.
2. Tony Kramer hosts the conversation with Clint Sedlacek, Monosem USA’s Western Territory Sales Manager, who covers the western U.S., Quebec, and Canada.
3. The episode asks what Monosem is for when a planter must handle corn, soybeans, flowers, arugula, bok choy, and many vegetable spacings.
4. Clint says Monosem was founded in France about 80 years ago by the Rubelot family and is credited with the first market-produced vacuum planter.
5. He says the U.S. division launched in 1980 and that Monosem now has planter products on nearly every continent.
6. Tony and Clint contrast broad-acre row crops with vegetable production, where onion and lettuce spacing can vary by inches between growers.
7. Clint says Monosem offers about 130 crop types on the NG+ and 80-plus on the MS, for more than 300 combined crop possibilities.
8. He says Monosem planters are hand-built with no assembly lines, and that every machine starts as a configurable baseline rather than a fixed spec.
9. Clint describes the Valaterra as the newest all-electric row unit with ASG high speed and a focus on corn and sunflower growers.
10. He describes NG+ as the long-running mainstay, NC as a large shoe planter for Latin America and Mexico, and MS as the mini seed planter for vegetables.
11. The MS lineup includes version A with front and rear press wheels for crops spaced eight inches or wider.
12. Version B strips the design down to reach about five and a half inches of spacing, especially when paired with a duo bar.
13. Version C uses a split shoe and dual seed disc to plant two seed lines from one meter, and version D mounts two MS meters into one onion planter row unit.
14. Version M is a high-density planter that can place anywhere from one meter to as many as 18 meters in a bed.
15. Version G was developed for the Yuma region so the planter carries weight on the toolbar and avoids compressing beds.
16. Clint says Monosem listens closely to customer feedback and will build new components if an existing building block does not fit the operation.
17. Clint says Deere bought Monosem in 2016, which opened access to Deere technology like SeedStar and Operations Center for Monosem equipment.
18. He says MS currently uses ground and hydraulic drive, while the new MS Electron replaces chains, sprockets, and hex shaft with electric motors and adds SeedStar M.
19. The tone is practical and technical, with Tony pressing for product details and Clint answering in a sales-and-application format.
20. Vegetable growers, planter buyers, and equipment dealers will get the most value, while listeners wanting a narrative story will probably skip it.
