Before you buy anything
Choosing a garlic planter
There are three ways to get garlic in the ground, and they suit three different farms. We build one of them. Here is an honest account of all three, including where ours is the wrong answer.
The three approaches
Every method trades between three things: how many people you need, how fast the crop goes in, and how many cloves end up the wrong way up.
| By hand | Semi-automatic ride-on | Fully automated | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who places the clove | A person, kneeling | A person, seated | A cup or belt |
| Orientation control | Full | Full | None |
| Double-drops and skips | None | None | Some |
| Rate over a full day | Falls away | Holds | Constant |
| People needed | Many | Two per machine | Tractor driver |
| Capital outlay | None | Moderate | High |
| Suits roughly | Under an acre | 1–20 acres | 20+ acres |
The acreage bands are a guide, not a rule. What actually decides it is whether you can find the people — see below.
When each one wins
Hand-planting wins
Under about an acre. One acre at 6″ × 6″ is 174,240 cloves — a hard week for a small crew, but one week, and no machine pays for itself against that.
It also wins when your beds are an awkward shape, when you are trialling varieties in short rows, or when the crop is small enough that buying anything would be solving a problem you do not have.
A ride-on planter wins
Roughly one to twenty acres, and specifically when the constraint is people rather than money. Two seated riders doing the work of a kneeling crew of four or six is worth more than the wage arithmetic suggests, because in most townships those extra four do not exist at any price in October.
It also wins when your cull rate matters — seed garlic, named varieties, or anything sold on appearance where a bent neck is a lost sale.
A fully automated planter wins
Above roughly twenty to thirty acres, or wherever the planting window is too short for any realistic crew to ride a machine through the whole crop.
At that scale you accept a percentage of misoriented cloves as a cost of doing business, because the alternative is not getting the crop in at all. If that is your situation, do not buy from us — buy the machine that matches the acreage.
The trade-off nobody puts in the brochure
A cup or belt planter meters cloves by dropping them. It has no way of knowing which end is the root plate, so a share of the crop goes in sideways or inverted. Those cloves still grow. They grow a bent neck and a smaller, misshapen bulb, and you find out about it ten months later at grading.
That cost never appears in a planting-day comparison, because it is not a planting-day cost. It is a harvest-day cost caused by a planting-day decision, which is exactly the kind of expense that is easy to leave out of a purchase calculation.
Whether it matters depends entirely on what you do with the crop. Selling into a processor by weight? Largely irrelevant. Selling seed garlic or named varieties at a farm gate? It is most of the argument.
Work it out for your farm
The honest way to decide is arithmetic on your own numbers, not on ours. Our calculator takes your acreage, spacing, labour rate and — most importantly — the rate your crew actually achieves by hand, and tells you what mechanising would and would not save.
It defaults to break-even rather than to a figure that flatters us, and it will tell you plainly when a machine is not worth buying.
Tell us about your beds
Get a quote
Send us your row spacing, bed width, tractor horsepower and how many acres you plant. We will tell you exactly how we would configure a machine for you — and if we are not the right fit, we will say so.