At present, no-tillage planters in Northeast China mainly depend on the weight to increase pressure to ensure the ditching depth. Aiming at this, a lightweight 2BQM-2 type maize ridge planter was designed. Its weight was half of the general no-tillage planter, so as to reduce the soil compaction. The new lightweight no-tillage planter was connected with a tractor to be a operating unit by hydraulic hitch equipment. The operating unit used the hydraulic structure of the tractor and the mechanical structure of the planter to jointly adjust the stubble breaking depth, seeding depth and depth stability. In order to verify the performance of the operation unit and get the best combination of working conditions, a quadratic orthogonal rotary composite experiment was designed with the planter speed, seeding depth and straw coverage quantity as experiment factors to evaluate tillage resistance of the planter and qualified rate of seed spacing. The optimum working conditions were as follows: the planter speed was 1.21m/s, the sowing depth was 4.96cm, and the straw coverage was 0.73kg/m2, the working resistance of the seeder was 3.62kN, and the seed-distance qualified rate was 93.63%. The validation test results showed that the test indexes met the requirements of the national industry standards. It proved that it was feasible to use the hydraulic system of tractor to exert the pressure on the stubble breaking device of the seeder. Through the optimum design, the weight of no-tillage planter was effectively reduced, the manufacturing cost of the machine and the energy consumption were reduced. By field measurements, the average soil depth of the compacted wheel was 10mm. It had satisfactory efficiency compared with the machines which flattened ridges. It can provide scientific basis and method of evaluation and improvement of maize no-tillage planter in Northeast China.