for your your situation, I would suggest a 4 row set up on 30" inch spacing, the rows will be 30" apart, this works out nice for most tractors with wheels set at 60" center to center, you can drive down the rows with running over corn or the place where you want to plant the corn,
Two basic types of planters, one is a surface planter, it plants like a drill or any mechanized narrow row seeder, for like wheat or oats,
but the spacing of the planting openers is 30", (in the US many years ago, a company called van brunt (John Deere ended up buying them out,)made a very successfully drill seeder, and one can use if the spacing is correct, 10" you block off two rows and only use ever third row, the feed cups are such they will plant corn,
but now they make special planters just for corn that are very expensive new, but they each have there own seed box, and metering systems and openers, and they usually use a bar and add as many of the units on it as wanted at the spacing one wants,
before chemicals, to control weeds, they made a corn planter, called a lister, it would plow a furrow and plant the seed in the bottom of the furrow, like in the bottom of a ditch,
when the weeds started to grow they used a machine called a GO dig, that had shields disks, and small tillage tools on it, this machine would ride the ridge of the mounds and in the multiple passes it would throw the dirt back on to the corn coving the weeds, (timing was of importance) as the corn had to be taller than the weeds, by about mid summer, the final pass with the machine would have put dirt up around the base of the plant and in the process (hopefully) had killed the weeds,
to day with the surface planter, (plants on flat ground), most farmers use chemicals and spray the corn with the proper chemical to kill the weeds that are coming and not kill the corn,
In the US we use what is called a Combine for harvesting, Combine means they combined the header and the thresher unit into one unit, thus the word Combine,
with a combine, they take the header off, (used for wheat and other small grains), and put on a corn header, or a machine made for picking corn off the stocks, the corn header is usually the same as the planter, unit or a mulplit of the planter unit,
most can not drive straight enough to not knock down corn if you would not get lined up with the planted rows, so you follow the planter if one has a 8 row planter then one could use a 2 or a 4 or a 8 row picker header to harvest it,
before combines they just used a corn picker, that would pick the ears and put them in a wagon, and the wagon would be taken out of the field and dumped in a pile or in a building to finish drying,
the pile would then either be ran through a stationary sheller or the corn feed to cattle on the ear,
and before that my dad would train horsed to pull wagons that a man would walk along and hand pick the corn and throw it in a wagon the horses would obey voice commands, and would stop or go or slow or speed up by the words used,
the wagons would be taken back and emptied and later they would shell the corn off the cobs,
like I said one could probably make a many row planter if the feed cups will feed corn seed, to work by blocking off a few rows and then only using ever 3th third one or so,
a tool bar with some shanks and sweep tillage tools on it will work for weeding it,
harvesting will most like be your biggest vhallange to mechanize,
take a look at this thread,
http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/projects/186813-food-plot-project.html some smaller planters pictured,
