Strange Spring weather

Well, on this damp evening, I am wondering if it will ever dry up enough this spring to be able to put in a crop here in southwest Iowa. As it does nearly every year, the weather will eventually cooperate, we just have to have some patience.

Many people have been talking this spring about buying a second planter and hiring someone to run it. For some, this also entails a second tractor as well as several other things required to have a complete second rig running.

My thoughts are that with an autopilot on a tractor, it can run overnight just as effectively as it can in the daylight. So, money can be much better spent on technology when in a pinch instead of a second planter that you may not need for many years to come. The autopilot will increase efficiency in several ways, and it will also be a powerful tool that can be used for many other things in a farming operation.

How do I hook up my GPS???

I have heard this question quite a bit recently, so I thought I would make a post about it. To completely answer this question would be a very long post, so I will target specifically to those with Ag Leader equipment as that is the largest percentage of my readers according to my poll.

Ag Leader uses a non-standard 9 pin connection. This means that unless you get an Ag Leader GPS, you will need an adapter cable, or more commonly called a null modem cable (PN 2000819).
The reason for this is because Ag Leader powers their own GPS units through the same 9 pin connector, so to hook up another brand of GPS it would send 12 volts of power to the unit possibly causing damage to it.

So the bottom line is, if you are using an Ag Leader monitor and Ag Leader GPS that does not have a seperate power cable, no adapter cables should be necessary - they should plug right together. If you are using a lightbar (even the ones that Ag Leader sells) or third party GPS, these are already powered on their own and do not need power from the monitor. This is where you will use the null modem cable.

Rain, Rain, Go Away!

In the middle of this rainy evening, I was reading the latest issue of Progressive Farmer and found an article to be quite interesting. It was titled "No Quick Fix to Fertilizer Prices".

I'm not going to get very deep into the article, as the title basically sums up the point I want to make.

As almost all input prices soar, we need to look to technology as a tool to help save some money. Automatic shutoffs have made a huge splash in the marketplace, from planters to sprayers to fertilizer applicators including NH3 and dry spreaders, not to mention strip till applications.

The concept here is simple - reduce overlap of product being applied by using GPS position to accurately turn on and shut off sections of large equipment instead of trying to do it all with one shutoff.

This alone can add up to huge savings. Hands down, this is the fastest return on investment most people have seen so far in precision ag. But why does it have to stop there?

Prior to this technology many people have used precision ag for variable rate fertilizer or lime, and in fields with changing landscape or soils this also adds up to big savings.

Here is something simple that many haven't thought of. For those of you spreading variable rate dry fertilizer, you can quickly squeeze a few more dollars out of each acre.

Often there is some nitrogen credit from the dry fertilizer being spread, and by using simple math we can cut back the amount of NH3 or other nitrogen source being applied by allowing for a credit in areas where higher rates of the dry fertilizer were spread.

I ran the numbers on this for a couple of fields, and this simple math averaged out to about $10 per acre saved in nitrogen. This only took a few minutes to create the prescription maps, and can be done with precision ag equipment that many already have.