Key Takeaways
- Improving singulation, spacing and emergence timing creates the best yield opportunity for your crop.
- Seed orientation influences emergence timing, early leaf development and sunlight capture, directly influencing yield potential.
- ArrowTube uses strategic friction, centrifugal force and precision-engineered components to orient every seed as it’s planted at high speed for maximum yield potential.
- ArrowTube increases best case seed orientation from 12% in conventional systems to 62%, reducing late emergers by 18% and supporting stronger early stand development.
Hear from Cory Muhlbauer, Ryan Baker, Jeremy Hodel and Caleb Schleder as they take a deep look at how singulation, spacing, emergence and seed orientation in high-speed planters influence yield. Learn how years of research at the plant level can directly lead to measurable ROI across your entire operation.
The ROI of Singulation and Uniform Emergence
Eight years of PTI research show the direct yield cost of poor singulation. A 1% decline in singulation accuracy results in nearly 2 bushels per acre lost, making meter performance a key profitability factor.
Uniform emergence represents an even larger opportunity. Plants emerging 36 to 48 hours late produce 30 to 60% less yield than plants emerging within the first 12 to 24 hours. This research makes it clear that managing depth, seedbed quality, soil density and closing performance creates some of the highest ROI available during the planting pass.
A New Agronomic Lever: Seed Orientation
Row cleaning, depth, soil density, spacing, singulation and closing systems have already been addressed and optimized by Precision Planting solutions. But there is another significant but often overlooked factor affecting your yield: seed orientation in the furrow.
Corn seeds germinate with the coleoptile growing away from the seed tip. Seeds planted tip down take the shortest path to the soil surface. Seeds placed on their side or tip up force the emerging shoot into 90 to 180 degree turns that slow emergence and consume energy.
Research reveals that seed orientation affects early leaf architecture as well. Embryos facing toward neighboring row encourage perpendicular leaf development that reduces plant‑to‑plant shading and improves sunlight interception.
If you give corn more sunlight, it will give you more yield.
Jason Webster
Lead Commercial Agronomist
How It Works
ArrowTube begins its work in the accelerator, where two counter‑rotating feeder wheels pull seeds off the vSet disk and rapidly bring them to speed. As seeds enter the engineered loop inside the accelerator, they encounter a precisely engineered combination of riding surfaces and guide walls. These surfaces apply carefully controlled friction that encourages the seed’s natural tendency to rotate tip‑forward. Because the center of gravity within a corn seed favors rotation toward the tip, this strategic friction consistently flips seeds into the desired orientation. As the seed completes the loop, it is transitioned away from the disk face and onto the delivery path that leads toward the furrow.
After orientation, ArrowTube maintains that alignment using a helix‑shaped delivery path designed to harness centrifugal force. As the seed moves through the curved liner, velocity and curvature work together to push the seed firmly into the corner of the pathway, locking orientation in place all the way to the soil. This continuous guidance piece eliminates the tumbling and bouncing common in conventional seed tubes, especially at high speeds.
A custom infrared sensor positioned at the bottom of the path verifies each seed’s passage and provides visibility on orientation. At the bottom of the unit where it meets the soil, a tungsten carbide knife cuts a narrow sub-furrow where every seed is slotted securely in the orientation that we are feeding it from the path. By the time the seed reaches the ground, ArrowTube has oriented, stabilized, and delivered it with accuracy that supports fast uniform emergence, optimized leaf development and higher yield potential.
ArrowTube Research Results
Across 3,000 acres of research, 75 hybrids, and diverse soil and weather conditions, ArrowTube consistently improved plant‑level outcomes.
Seed Orientation Improvements
ArrowTube delivers seed in the ideal orientation (tip down) 62% of the time, compared to just 12% in conventional systems.
- Worst case orientation categories (tip up and tip sideways, embryo down) drop from 29% to 8%.
- Nearly 90% of seeds land in the top two orientation categories with ArrowTube.
Emergence Gains
Across all of our testing, spanning multiple planting years, 75 different hybrids and differing soil environments, ArrowTube reduced late emergers by 18% overall.
Sunlight Interception Results
Solar panel tests placed under canopies show that crops planted with ArrowTube consistently reduced “wasted” sunlight – light hitting the ground – and increased daily light energy captured by the crop. The accumulated advantage over the growing season is roughly 490 kW-hr/Ac (kilowatt‑hours per acre) per day during the test period, or about 10x as much as a large home installation of solar panels.
Spacing at High Speed
At both slow and fast planting speeds, ArrowTube matches or exceeds the spacing performance of SpeedTube and ExactEmerge, while also delivering optimal seed orientation.
We saw a 6.43 bushel advantage across 52 reps with an 87% win rate
Yield Gains Across Multi-Year Trials
Across four years of on‑farm research, ArrowTube achieved:
- 75% win rate in side‑by‑side trials
- 6 to 8 bushel gains in full field comparisons depending on the environment
- Consistent advantages even in stressful early‑season conditions
These results confirm that improved seed orientation with ArrowTube delivers measurable and repeatable yield benefits that scale across all of your acres.
