Tramline farming means this farmer keeps covering the same ground.

Peter Brewer farms on the straight and not-so-narrow. For the past several years, Brewer has established tramlines (permanent wheel tracks) in his wheat and soybean fields in Grundy County, Mo.

"Tramlines are pretty straightforward, if you match machinery widths," said Brewer. "You need to have equipment widths that are divisible into the widest unit.

"I don't set up tramlines in the headlands of a field," Brewer added. "I plant out the headlands, then start with tramlines on the longest straight side of the field. Tramlines would work best in fields that are square or rectangular, but most of our fields are odd shaped. Still, it works very well."

Brewer grows about 1,800 acres of soybeans and 500 acres each of corn and wheat each growing season. Soybeans and wheat are planted with a Great Plains no-till drill. Corn goes in with an eight-row, 30-inch no-till planter.

"We establish tramlines with my self-propelled sprayer, which has an 82-foot boom," Brewer explains. "I modified the 35-feet-wide Great Plains drill, adding extra units to make the drill 41 feet wide. On every other pass with the drill, I'm driving in the tracks made by the sprayer. We use the same tramlines every year."

But Brewer's drill needed some after-market tinkering to make it adapt to the sprayer width. He bought a Great Plains 3510 no-till air seeder. The 110-bushel hoppers gave Brewer a lot of seeding capacity between refills, and he liked that feature.

"But the drill was only 35 feet wide, with 56 rows on 7.5-inch spacing," he recalled. "I needed 41 feet to match my tramlines."

So, Brewer pulled the drill into his shop and added 3-foot wings on both ends of the planter toolbar. The extensions brought the drill's width to 41 feetÑjust what Brewer needed to correspond with his sprayer width. The wings on either side are attached to the original drill frame with heavy-duty hinges. However, rather than swing out, the extensions are hinged to fold backward.

"When folded for traveling, the original drill was 14.5 feet tall," he said. "Another 3 feet would put it into telephone and utility lines. And rigging the wings to fold to the side would make the drill wider than I wanted it, so I hinged the extensions to fold backward, bat-wing fashion."

Brewer also installed a "tramming" unit on the drill, which automatically blanks out drill rows directly over the permanent wheel tracks and diverts the seed to adjacent rows.

"I set the unit to kick in every other trip through the field," he said. "That way, I'm leaving blank rows on every other pass. I know that I need to be tramming every time I plant in a certain direction. Every other time I lift the drill, a read switch sets the tramming unit. That leaves a 17-inch space where wheels run. It sounds complicated, but it's real easy to set up with an air-seeder."

Peter and Sue Brewer moved from England in 1983 and began farming near Trenton, in northwest Missouri. Tramlines are relatively more popular in England than in Missouri, Brewer noted, but he thinks more farmers here could make profitable use of them.

"The biggest advantage is, I'm not knocking down any crops when I do multiple applications after the crop is up," he said. "That's especially important with a crop like wheat, because we go over the field several times to apply herbicides, fertilizer and fungicides."

Paul Tracy, MFA staff agronomist, agrees.

"Field applications with permanent wheel tracks are more efficient, too," said Tracy. "In addition to no physical damage to the crop, you avoid skips or overlaps. This makes tramlines cost effective and more production efficient. A tractor with 18-inch tires and a 60-feet-wide boom rides down 5 percent of a crop."

Some growers wonder about yield loss with the blank rows left unplanted in tramline systems.

"With season-long, unplanted tire tracks, there's no appreciable loss of yield, because plants in rows adjacent to the tracks compensate," said Tracy. "They have more access to water, light and plant nutrients and at least partially make up for the skipped rows."

Another benefit: soil compaction is concentrated in a small area, compared with running heavy machines all over the field, said Brewer.

Brewer and Tracy agree that such a system requires a little planning.

"The main thing is to match equipment by track width and overall machine width or boom width," said Brewer. "We do our own spraying, but I think tramlines would work even if you hire custom applicators. You'd simply need to find out the boom width of the custom rig and size other equipment to be divisible into that width."