ST. LOUIS, Mo. — The planting window for farmers remains the same whether they’re working 100 or 1,000 acres. As a result, growers who are expanding their operations are looking for larger planting systems so they can cover more ground in the same amount of time.

To meet their expanding needs, air drills that are 90 feet wide or more are being paired with air carts that carry more than 800 bushels of tiny seeds. Tractors that are toting these implements are required to be bigger and stronger.

Bigger normally equates with being better. But with increased size of this farm equipment comes enormous costs, not to mention needing a larger barn to house these contraptions. And what effect do they have on rural roadways? What burden is there on small and mid-size bridges?

“Equipment has gotten much, much larger,” said Vernon Schmidt, executive vice president of the Farm Equipment Manufacturing Assoc. of St. Louis. “The equipment has gotten wider and wider, as well as heavier and heavier. The larger equipment is designed to be run in very large fields.

“The further west one goes, the larger the equipment gets. If you get into Nebraska and Kansas and western states where you have fields you cannot see from one end to the other, it’s an ideal setting for this large equipment. These farmers will be using different equipment than you would find in Kentucky and Ohio, where you have creeks and hills in your way.”

While many “monster” tractors and combines occasionally make an appearance at such shows as Power Show Ohio in Columbus and elsewhere, they’re most often purchased by growers west of the Mississippi River, and even into Canada where expanses of property are found.

Just how big the equipment can get in North America is limited by the need for farmers to use public roads to move machinery between fields.

“Transportation is a huge deal with this equipment,” said Jack Oberlander, manager of the planting and seeding division for Amity Technology, Fargo, N.D. “Getting air drills, for instance, to fold into a small enough package to move along public roads puts a limit on how wide the equipment can be in the field. Once in the field, there’s really no limit, especially with tractors gaining more horsepower nearly every year.”

Oberlander said the more densely populated a region, the greater the risk of moving large equipment down the highway.

“Some farm equipment has to be within 3.5 meters to use the highway. Regulations like that make it a challenge to design larger equipment,” he said. “If we could move them down the road, we’d build bigger drills and farmers would buy them.

“Folding becomes too complex if you go past 90 feet. It’s too tall and wide for normal transport. As an engineer, it’s a fun challenge, but there are always limitations. It would be easy to make the folding mechanism too complicated.”

In Canada, one can expect to see farm equipment increase with size. For starters, rural expanse allows for it.

“Like most areas, farms in this region are getting bigger as owners retire and sell out to operations that are expanding. The average acres our customers run has easily doubled in the past several years,” says Jason Hipkins, sales manager for Fosters in Beaverlodge, Alberta. “I don’t have many guys under 4,000 acres these days.”

That’s good news when it comes to selling air planting systems, which make up 40 percent of Fosters’ sales. “As farmers cover more acres, air planters make more sense financially,” Hipkins said.

“Due to the cost of this machinery and the technology that goes into it, farmers must plant thousands of acres for it to make sense. You can’t have a 75-foot drill and seed 1,500 acres with it. The cost per acre would be astronomical.”

Such monster-sized equipment does make its way into Midwest states such as Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, but Schmidt said few are sold east of the Mississippi.

“The farm community population has gotten smaller and there are fewer people available to drive those tractors through the field, and they’ve been forced by the labor market to become more efficient and find ways of using fewer people,” Schmidt said. “Technology has taken leaps and bounds the past 10 to 15 years with the GPS and the smart planters and all the numbers being generated in those combines. Suddenly you have tractors and equipment that keeps growing in size.

“Things are getting more expensive. You can’t afford to have more and more tractors because the cost is so high on the technology end. Out in places like Nebraska and Kansas, the farmer isn’t just farming his 300 to 600 acres, he’s farming land that he’s rented over two to three counties.

“Now you have all this large equipment that was designed to be used in fields, that has to be taken out on the public roadways,” he pointed out.

According to Schmidt, he and his firm were in Wisconsin recently addressing a legislature dealing with exemptions given to agriculture equipment when traversing county roadways. He said the Wisconsin departments of Transportation and Agriculture have a study group going to attempt to balance the needs of the agricultural community and to lessen the effect of farm equipment on the state’s roadways.

“Because the weight on some of this equipment has gotten so high, a lot of states are looking at these weight limits on our roadways and bridges. Some of these tractors can weigh up to 60,000 pounds on their own,” he said. “It’s a major issue and a balance has to be found.

“The beautiful, straight roads you find, say, in Kansas can handle equipment that you would never dream of trying to run through the hills of Pennsylvania or even Ohio.”

Large farm equipment and rural roads don’t always work well together.

“Some farmers say that the next combine they purchase may not fit in the shed, as their current ones barely clear the rafters,” Oberlander said. “Whether they get another combine or build a new shed, neither way is very cheap.”