Bonus for blog readers

I thought I would lay out a bonus for anyone that reads this blog and purchased equipment from HTS. Call or e-mail us and we will send out a technician to ride along with you while you are in the field to help you better understand your system. This will be first come first served, and will be at no charge! Any non warranty repairs made while the technician is onsite will be billable though.

Questions Please!!!

Thank you Steve, you led me right into the next post to this blog that I had in mind.

Steve posted comments about an eariler post I had made, and asked a question to me.

Please, use this as a way to ask questions or send me ideas of topics you would like discussed. Odds are if you have the question, so do several other people. I want to make this blog something interesting to you, instead of my random thoughts.

To answer your question Steve, I am all for saving on input costs and doing so using technology. As for specific agronomic advice, I am not the one to talk to. I'm not an agronomist, and won't claim to be one - I'm the technology guy.

Is this thing planting?

Over the past few weeks as the planters started rolling, I have had several questions about when the planter starts and stops using the autoswath control from Ag Leader, so I thought I would explain how to adjust this.

The Ag Leader Insight uses look ahead settings. This is simply a time measurement so that we can trigger an event and allow for the time it takes the machine to react. There are two different settings here - turn on look ahead and turn off look ahead. This is because it takes less time to turn the planter off than it does to turn it back on using the air clutches.

Here is the basics of it - we want the planter to start at point X, and we know that it mechanically takes about one second to turn on the planter for it to start planting, we need to send the signal one second before we get to point X. The same goes for turning off the planter.

These numbers on the Ag Leader system are set by default at 1.1 seconds for the turn on, and .4 seconds for the turn off. To adjust, move them only .1 seconds at a time, and make sure you dig to see where the seed is dropping. To make the planter start dropping seed sooner, increase the turn on look ahead. To make the planter stop dropping seed sooner, increase the turn off look ahead.