They Threw Away the Old Seed Drill. He Pulled It From the Trash — Changed Everything.

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]The drill had been sitting at the edge of the equipment graveyard behind the Tanner County Co-op in Skellytown, Texas since the third week of March 2008. It was a John Deere Van Brunt FB, a press wheel grain drill built sometime in the early 1950s based on the casting marks on the frame, and it had arrived at the graveyard the way most things arrive at a graveyard without ceremony on the back of a flatbed as the final stop in a long decline. The Co-op had taken it as partial payment on a debt from a retiring farmer named Frank Essary who had run it on his place for 30 years before his knees gave out and his son decided he wanted no part of farming and the whole operation wound down in the particular quiet way that operations wind down when the second generation has already made its decision and nobody is going to say so out loud. The Co-op's equipment manager had looked at the drill when it came off the flatbed and said it was too far gone to sell and not worth the time to restore and had told the yard man to push it to the back fence with the rest of the iron that wasn't going anywhere.

[00:01:02]Every man who looked at that drill saw the same thing. Rust, missing press wheels, a cracked seed cup on the third opener from the left, 40 years of caked soil in the frame tubes. They were all looking at the same condition and they were all drawing the wrong conclusion from it. Most people who watch stories like this scroll past without ever subscribing, but if you've ever been underestimated, talked over, dismissed, or told that something you believed in wasn't worth saving, stay with us.

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[00:01:35]The man who pulled it from the graveyard was named Curtis Pell. He was 44 years old in the spring of 2008 and he farmed 380 acres of dryland ground in Carson County, Texas. Mostly winter wheat, some grain sorghum, and in recent years an increasing number of acres in a cover crop rotation that his neighbors regarded with varying degrees of tolerance and his banker regarded with the patient skepticism of a man who has learned to wait out agricultural enthusiasms without comment. Curtis had been no-till farming since 2003, which in the Texas Panhandle in 2003 was not a common position, and he had arrived at it the way most farmers arrive at unconventional positions, through a sequence of bad years that made the conventional approach feel less like wisdom and more like a habit nobody had bothered to question.

[00:02:25]The drill was the problem. No-till planting requires a drill that can cut through crop residue and penetrate undisturbed soil without smearing the seed furrow or pushing the residue into the slot where it interferes with germination.

[00:02:37]The modern no-till drills built for this purpose, Great Plains, Sunflower, Haybuster, ran between $18,000 and $28,000 new in 2008, and the used market was thin because farmers who owned them needed them.

[00:02:54]Curtis had been managing with a modified conventional drill that he had fitted with aftermarket disk openers, which worked adequately in light residue and failed in heavy residue in the particular way that adequate solutions fail when the conditions exceed their design tolerance. He had spent two seasons watching his establishment rates drop in the high residue fields and telling himself he would find a better solution when he could afford one.

[00:03:18]He had driven past the co-op graveyard in April of 2008 on the way back from a parts run in Skellytown, which is not a city of many detours, and had seen the Van Brunt from the road. He had not stopped immediately. He had driven another quarter mile and then turned around, which is what Curtis Pell did when something caught his attention that he could not immediately explain. He turned around because his father had told him that the things you turn back for are usually the things worth turning back for, and that the things you don't turn back for have a way of staying with you longer than the ones you chose to ignore.

[00:03:52]He walked the drill for 20 minutes. The equipment manager came out and watched him from the shop door for a while.

[00:03:58]Curtis asked what the co-op wanted for it. The equipment manager said they wanted it gone and that $25 would accomplish that. Curtis paid it and went home for the trailer. His neighbor to the north, a wheat farmer named Dub Garland, who had been running conventional tillage on 500 acres in Carson County since 1981, and who had strong opinions about most aspects of farming that he was willing to share without being asked, saw the Van Brunt on Curtis's trailer when Curtis drove past and said the next time they were in the same place at the same time that he hoped Curtis hadn't paid much for it. Curtis said he had paid $25. Dub said that was probably $25 the co-op didn't deserve. He was not being unkind. He was being Dub Garland, which in Carson County amounted to the same thing. Curtis's father was a man named Harold Powell, who had farmed 240 acres in the eastern part of Carson County from 1969 until his death in 2006, and who had owned a Van Brunt drill. Not the same one, a different model, from 1974 until 1991. Harold had replaced it in 1991 with a newer machine because the drill salesman had convinced him the new openers would improve his establishment rates, and they had, modestly, in good conditions, in bad conditions, dry soil, heavy residue, the kind of spring the Texas Panhandle produces 4 years out of 10, Harold had found the new machine's performance indistinguishable from the Van Brunt's, and had said so to Curtis more than once in the years before his death.

[00:05:35]He had said something else, too, which Curtis had filed away without fully understanding it at the time, that the Van Brunt's press wheel design created a firming action on the seed furrow that the newer disclosure systems did not replicate and that in dry seeding conditions, which in dryland farming in the panhandle were not unusual, that firming action was the difference between a seed in contact with moisture and a seed suspended in a slot that dried out before it could germinate.

[00:06:01]Harold had known this from 40 years of watching seeds come up or not come up and from conversations with an agronomist at the Texas A&M Extension Office in Amarillo named Dr. Reeves who had done seeding depth and furrow closure research in the 1970s and who had published a bulletin in 1979 that Harold had read and kept. Curtis had found the bulletin in a box of Harold's papers after the funeral. He had read it twice without entirely understanding the physics. He had read it a third time in the winter of 2007 after a poor establishment year in his high residue fields and had understood it. The Van Brunt's press wheels were the key not just for firming. The double disc openers on the original design paired with the cast iron press wheels Harold had described created a seed environment in dry conditions that the rubber tire closers on modern no-till drills did not match in coarse textured soils. The physics were in Dr. Reeves's 1979 bulletin, explained in the language of 1979 soil science, which was slower and more observational than what came after but which was not wrong. It was describing something real. Curtis had spent the winter of 2007 understanding what it was describing and when he drove past the co-op graveyard in April of 2008 and saw a Van Brunt at the back fence, he did not stop immediately because the connection took a quarter mile to finish forming.

[00:07:22]The restoration took 14 months. Curtis did it himself in the evenings and on the weekends that harvest and planting left open, which in dryland farming in Carson County is a more generous schedule than in irrigated country but still requires a person to be deliberate about time.

[00:07:39]He sourced replacement press wheels from a dealer in Oklahoma who specialized in antique and vintage farm equipment parts and who found three matching cast iron units in a warehouse in 2 weeks for three. $140 total. The cracked seed cup was fabricated from sheet steel by a welder in Panhandle, Texas named Arturo Medina who charged $85 and who told Curtis afterward that it was the most unusual repair request he had received in 11 years of shop work which Curtis took as a reasonable observation rather than a criticism. The disc openers were cleaned and reset.

[00:08:16]The seed tubes replaced with modern polymer replacements that fit the original fittings and the frame was media blasted and painted with a two-part epoxy primer that Curtis applied himself with a rented spray gun over 2 weekends in February of 2009.

[00:08:32]The total restoration cost including the $25 purchase price, the press wheels, the fabricated seed cup, the media blast, the paint, the seed tubes, and the new hitch hardware came to $1,140.

[00:08:47]He could have bought a comparable modern no-till drill for 17 times that. The winter before that first run 2008 going into 2009, Curtis had spent more evenings than he could accurately count in the equipment shed with the drill on jack stands and a shop light clamped to the frame, fitting and refitting components and running seed through the cups by hand to check flow rates and verify the tube alignment.

[00:09:12]Donna Pell, his mother, came out to the shed one evening in January and stood in the doorway for a while without saying anything and then said that Harold had stood in almost exactly that position in their shed in Clarendon the winter he bought the 1974 machine doing the same thing for the same reason she couldn't entirely name. Curtis hadn't known what to say to that. He still doesn't if you ask him.

[00:09:35]He just knew that it was true and that it was the right kind of true to know before a first run. He ran it for the first time in the fall of 2009 in the South Field, where his establishment rates had been worst. A 60-acre block with a heavy wheat residue load from the previous season that his modified conventional drill had struggled with in 2007. He planted hard red winter wheat.

[00:09:57]He set the seeding depth to 1 and 1/2 in, which was 1.5 which was shallower than his previous practice because the Van Brunt's press wheels closed the furrow with enough firmness that seed-to-soil contact was reliable at the shallower depth. And the shallower depth meant faster emergence in the dry conditions he was planting into.

[00:10:15]Emergence came in at 91% across the 60 acres. His 2007 establishment rate in that same field with the modified conventional drill in similar conditions had been 63%. He stood at the field edge in October with a stand count in his notebook and looked at it for a while.

[00:10:34]Not with surprise, exactly. He had expected it to work. He was surprised by how well. Dub Garland came over in November, which was not unusual. The two men had a long-standing arrangement of mutual surveillance that both of them would have described as neighboring and that served the same function. Dub walked the South Field with Curtis and looked at the stand and said it was a good stand. Curtis said it was.

[00:10:58]Dub said the drill seemed to have worked out. Curtis said it had. Dub asked how much he had in it. Curtis told him $1,140.

[00:11:08]Dub was quiet for a moment. He said he had paid $21,000 for a no-till drill in 2005 and that his establishment rates in heavy residue were not substantially better than what Curtis was getting out of a machine built before either of them was born. He said it without self-pity.

[00:11:25]He said it the way a man states a fact that he is still working through the implications of. Curtis let him work through it. He did not offer anything further. He had learned from Harold that there are conversations where a man needs the space to reach his own conclusions, and that filling that space with your own conclusions is a way of making the other man's thinking unnecessary, which is not a kindness even when it feels like one. Lydia Schofield was the extension agronomist for Carson County at the time, and she had been watching Curtis's no-till transition since 2003 with the specific professional interest of a person who is seeing something work that the research said should work, but that the local farming community had been slow to adopt. She came out to look at the South field in the spring of 2010 when the wheat was up, and she walked the stand with a measuring wheel and a notebook.

[00:12:13]And she asked Curtis a long series of questions about his planting date, his seeding rate, his depth, and the condition of the residue at planting.

[00:12:20]She asked him about the drill. He showed it to her. She looked at the press wheels for a while. She said she had read about the furrow firming advantage of cast iron press wheels in dryland conditions, but had not seen it demonstrated this cleanly in the field. She asked if she could bring her soil physics colleague from Amarillo out in the fall. Curtis said that was fine. The colleague came.

[00:12:42]He took furrow profile measurements at three locations in the South field and two locations in the North field where Curtis had run the modified conventional drill in the same season for comparison.

[00:12:52]He published a short technical note in the Texas Plant and Soil Science Journal in 2011 that described the furrow closure characteristics of the restored Van Bruin in coarse textured dryland soils and the establishment rate outcomes, and that cited Harold Pells agronomist 1979 bulletin as an early documentation of the same phenomenon. He sent Curtis a copy. Curtis put it in the same box as the bulletin. Both documents are still in the box which Curtis keeps on the shelf in the equipment shed above the workbench where he does most of his thinking.

[00:13:25]He is 60 years old now. He still farms 380 acres in Carson County. The Van Brunt goes out every fall.

[00:13:33]It has not had a mechanical failure in 15 years of no-till planting, which is the kind of record that a machine built in the 1950s with cast iron components and simple mechanics is in a position to achieve when it has been restored properly and maintained honestly. He has been asked twice whether he would sell it. He has said no both times without much deliberation. It is not a collectible. It is not a museum piece. It is a piece of equipment that works. That cost $1,140 to make work. And that carries in its press wheels and its disc openers a piece of knowledge that Harold Pell pulled from a 1979 bulletin and kept in a box for 30 years so that his son could find it when he needed it.

[00:14:15]That is not a small thing to pull from a graveyard for $25.

[00:14:19]That is not a small thing at all.