Research developments by Harold Wiedemann.

My most significant development is the chaffy grass seed metering device which has become the industry standard. The auger agitators and pickerwheels are housed in the semicircular seedbox (note grass seeder on the right). Over 85% of the grass drills use the concept and it has been estimated that over 400 million dollars worth of grass seed was planted using the metering device during the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). A Texas-based company started marketing the device in 1979, sold 2.2 million dollars of drills in the first five years and became a leading manufacturer in the United States. Currently, six manufacturers use the concept. The metering device played a major role in seeding two million acres of WW Spar bluestem in northwest Texas and western Oklahoma over the past 15 years.

The low-energy grubber features a hydraulically controlled grubbing blade which increased the uprooting capacity by 1/3. It was successful on five major brush species in Texas. The concept of grubbing smaller trees with more cost-effective equipment resulted in tractor sales and grubber construction dollar volume of 1 to 1.5 million per year in Texas over a five-year period in the late 1970's and units are now used worldwide. Several Texas companies currently market grubbers for small tractors.

One of my more innovative ideas was the disk-chain-diker for enhanced seedbed preparation on rangeland. The device was developed in cooperationwith an Australian inventor, and we won a national award for the idea. In one pass, it tilled , smoothed and formed basins in the soil on shrub infested land, and it has over doubled grass stands compared to conventional methods. The device has generated interest for use in range seeding in Texas, western U.S., Australia and Argentina. It has been used by the USDA Forest Service and Utah Fish and Game for habitat enhancement, the BLM in Idaho for seeding grass strips to contain wildfires, biosolid incorporation on rangeland, and landfill seedbed preparation.

An elevated chaining technique under development to fell large trees, uses a rotating steel ball attached in the center of an anchor chain which is pulled between two crawler tractors. The technique has reduced drawbar pull to fell junipers by 67 to 84% compared to ground level chaining. The elevated chaining combined with prescribed fire offers a method to cost effectively recover grasslands lost to dense juniper infestations. The chaining burning combination is being studied as a method to modify the habitat of the horse fly (a.k.a. cedar fly) which may break the fly's life cycle and reduce the population of flies.

Last modified: May 15, 1997.