Some planters and drills provide opener scrapers to keep soil buildup and residue from damaging the disks while seeding. Other drills come without scrapers and rely on seed boots and gauge wheels to do the scraping work. But mud buildup on gauge wheels can affect planting depth accuracy. An effective scraper keeps the disc clean and helps the seed be planted at the right depth. There is minimized buildup if the scraper is working efficiently. Often, standard scrapers that come with drills and planters don’t last long, and producers find they need to replace them after a season or two.

Rouse explained there are two types of planting drills, one that uses shovels with points driving through the ground, and the disc drill, which cleans the disc. Row planters have two disc scrapers to keep those discs clean. Air Design has been custom designing and manufacturing in-house a stronger, long-lasting scraper made with a tungsten carbide edge for a wide array of planting and seeding equipment. The company uses a tungsten carbide edge called wearcarb with a high level of hardness, manufactured by a U.S. company. Tungsten carbide is extremely durable, long-lasting and provides a more effective scraping edge.

Air Design uses a waterjet to custom design the scrapers to fit almost any manufacturer’s equipment and to meet an individual farmer’s specifications. The abrasive waterjets use high-pressure water stream to cut through alloys, stone, wood, glass, neoprene and many other materials. Producers who have used them say the tungsten carbide scrapers last a long time and work better than standard scrapers. Bruce Freitag, a sunflower, wheat and pulse crop producer in southwestern North Dakota, said he liked the Air Design scrapers his operation used on a no-till planter.

Congolese warlords and unethical U.S. corporations will be the big winners if U.S. President Donald Trump goes ahead with a reported plan to suspend the restrictions on “conflict minerals” from Central African war zones, human-rights groups say.

Athletes will dream of winning gold, silver or bronze at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. They could go home with aluminum, cadmium or tungsten.

For the last 20 years China has been the world's largest consumer of tungsten. Over this period its share of world tungsten use has increased substantially; from just under 30% in 1996 to nearly 60% in 2016.