HTS honored Silver Circle Award from Trimble

At the recent Trimble Annual Reseller's meeting, HTS received the Silver Circle Award for "Outstanding Sales and Invaluable Customer Service" in 2009.

We are seeing a tremendous growth in the Autopilot steering systems, and I wanted to take a minute to break down the technology and its value.

Autosteer in the midwest has been somewhat slow to adapt compared to other areas of the country, and I believe much of this has been because of the value of the crops.  We were comparing our $2/bushel corn and $6/bushel beans to the high dollar vegetable crops of the west coast.  The ROI just isn't there, or so we thought.  The thing is, everyone forgot that we are no longer working with those prices.  With $3-$4 corn, and $9-$10 beans, there is a significant return on investment with an autosteer system. 

We are also working with bigger machines now.  This means that the cost per hour to run the machine has went up, because it is burning more fuel, and the depreciation on the machine adds up quickly with every hour on the tach.

There is also a third leg to this that I haven't mentioned yet.  Operator fatigue has become a bigger and bigger deal.  This is tough to put a dollar figure on, but there is definitely significant value to getting home at night and not being completely wore out from running the tractor across the field all day long.  This comes into play in the years like what we have had recently, with shorter windows of opportunities to get the crops in and out of the field.

What does this all mean?  You can easily pay for autosteer technology on your farm.  Contact HTS to find out how this can pay back for you.

It's so new, we're still playing with the bubble wrap!

I thought I would take a moment to share some of my experiences about using the Iowa DOT Real Time Network on the autopilot in my tractor this spring. For those of you that don't know, the Iowa DOT put up a network of RTK base stations so that it covers the entire state with network RTK corrections available on the internet. They are providing these corrections free of charge, but you still have to be able to access the internet from the cab of your tractor. That is where the expense comes in. Anyhow, on to the operation of it.

Last Friday the network was down, so we were out of luck for most of the day if you wanted to use this network. Sunday evening I got some new updates loaded and got everything connected, but didn't make it to the field. Sitting in the yard everything appeared to look pretty good though. Yesterday, I finally made it to the field with the unit to plant, and started on a 80 acre field. Things were off to a good start as I started planting the first pass around the field, but about one third of the way around the field on the first pass I lost corrections for the first time. I sat and waited about 5 minutes or so, and finally got reconnected to the network. This process continued for the next few hours, planting and waiting, planting and waiting. I was able to accomplish about 16 acres over the course of 3 hours or so, and I am running a 16 row planter. Definitely wasn't setting any land speed records yesterday! All in all, the performance was quite good running the system when it worked, but I unfortunately spent way too much time sitting and waiting for the RTK to lock in. I think we are making headway on this, but we are still a ways from having all the bugs worked out. Like I was saying, this stuff is extremely new, and although it appears as though it will be a great technology to work with in the future, we still have a few bugs to work out of it.

Auto-Steer on a Combine?

Yes, I did it. I know this may sound a bit extreme, but I took the plunge and put an EZ Steer on my combine for cutting soybeans. I wasn't extremely happy with the results at first, but I also think my expectations are quite high after running an autopilot on my tractor for planting. Anyhow, I first ran the unit on WAAS, and although it did quite well, I wasn't quite satisfied with the performance, so I set up the unit for OmniSTAR XP. I was amazed with the unit after this! Don't get me wrong, the unit did work quite well on WAAS. It allowed me to pay closer attention to the crop as it was coming in the head, as well as keep a closer eye on the quality of grain sample in the tank and other functions of the machine. The problem is that my expectations were to keep the platform completely full and not miss a single stalk of beans, while running on contours and hills. I could get one or the other with WAAS, but was finally able to get both with OmniSTAR. This also increased the accuracy of my Autoswath on my Insight by having a more accurate GPS signal.
The one thing that sold me completely on the unit was the rounded off 90 degree corner I made with the combine the first pass through the field, it followed perfectly the second round when making end rows. Technology has come a long way!