Seeds of change

The greenhouse next to Conic System’s seed-planting company in Barcelona is filled with the welcoming scent of new growth. The building houses budding plants that the company sells to hobby gardeners and growers. And the space also provides the perfect test bed for innovations in Conic System’s seed-planting and irrigation machinery.

After decades in agriculture, the Gusi family still could not find a suitable machine to rapidly and effectively plant seeds in trays for nurseries. So they built their own, and formed the company Conic System. The machine—rapid, efficient, and cost effective—has helped nurseries for food products and forestry for more than 20 years.

But in the past two years, the company’s engineers have incorporated dramatic improvements to the seed-sowing technology to create the first fully automatic seeding machine.

Seeds come in significantly different sizes, and so trays, holes, and the machine’s settings must be changed to switch from, for instance, onion seeds to the larger cucumber seeds. Today all these changes and adjustments are done by hand, a time-consuming process. Now Conic Systems engineers have developed a new machine that employs advances in computer technology to allow all changes to the settings to be made using a touch screen.

This took significant in-house creativity. “The commercial computers available in the market, the ones that would be able to do what we need, are very expensive,” says Jordi Gusi, director of sales. “So we began to make our own hardware for the kinds of things we need the machine to do: to change the tray, the way the machine is moving, the height and width.” The new system is about 20 percent faster than the previous one, and reduces the frequency of errors.

To facilitate maintenance, the seeder machines can be connected by the Internet to Conic System’s offices, so the company can diagnose any problem remotely —whether it’s in South America or China or Australia—and provide detailed repair information. The first prototypes have recently been completed: one will be installed for a client in Barcelona, another in Israel.

Sowing module TD1-235. Photo: Conic Systems

Seeds of change

The greenhouse next to Conic System’s seed-planting company in Barcelona is filled with the welcoming scent of new growth. The building houses budding plants that the company sells to hobby gardeners and growers. And the space also provides the perfect test bed for innovations in Conic System’s seed-planting and irrigation machinery.

After decades in agriculture, the Gusi family still could not find a suitable machine to rapidly and effectively plant seeds in trays for nurseries. So they built their own, and formed the company Conic System. The machine—rapid, efficient, and cost effective—has helped nurseries for food products and forestry for more than 20 years.

But in the past two years, the company’s engineers have incorporated dramatic improvements to the seed-sowing technology to create the first fully automatic seeding machine.

Seeds come in significantly different sizes, and so trays, holes, and the machine’s settings must be changed to switch from, for instance, onion seeds to the larger cucumber seeds. Today all these changes and adjustments are done by hand, a time-consuming process. Now Conic Systems engineers have developed a new machine that employs advances in computer technology to allow all changes to the settings to be made using a touch screen.

This took significant in-house creativity. “The commercial computers available in the market, the ones that would be able to do what we need, are very expensive,” says Jordi Gusi, director of sales. “So we began to make our own hardware for the kinds of things we need the machine to do: to change the tray, the way the machine is moving, the height and width.” The new system is about 20 percent faster than the previous one, and reduces the frequency of errors.

To facilitate maintenance, the seeder machines can be connected by the Internet to Conic System’s offices, so the company can diagnose any problem remotely —whether it’s in South America or China or Australia—and provide detailed repair information. The first prototypes have recently been completed: one will be installed for a client in Barcelona, another in Israel.

Sowing module TD1-235. Photo: Conic Systems