psandhu

This is for a 10 acre dove field.

A few months ago I bought an old 2 row planter, to plant sunflowers, milo, corn, etc in the field. I had been broadcasting the fertilizer and seed, then disking it all up in the previous years, but I had mostly pigweed that came up.

This year I am going to apply a preplant herbicide to control the pigweed, and plant the sunflowers in 30" rows.

The row planter is missing the fertilizer boxes, but it has the mounting brackets, sprockets and other hardware.

I did a little research, and band fertilization is good when soil is relatively cooler. Since the roots are growing slower the nutrients are right there. I have to plant some time in April in order for the plants to be ready by Sept 1. When I planted in early May, the sunflowers were still green and not mature when dove season started.


Questions:

Will band fertilization be that much of significant benefit for a dove field as opposed to broadcast fertilization?

Any ideas on how to fabricate something to apply the fertilizer in bands? I thought about a couple of short piece of 4" or 6" pvc mounted on the frame with a small funnel on one end of each, and then running 2 plastic tubes from the funnels to where the furrows are. basically something that would look and function like a gigantic hourglass that's been cut at the narrow portion and has the plastic tube where it's been cut in half.

Any other tips or advice you can give me would be appreciated.