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FARGO — David Gorder stated maintaining with farm know-how doesn’t all the time imply having to purchase new gear.
For the farm he helps function close to Grand Forks, North Dakota, it is smart so as to add on to gear already within the shed and use software program to make good enterprise selections.
“We did a lot of retrofitting of equipment,” Gorder stated throughout a panel dialogue at Cultivate, an agriculture know-how convention, hosted by Grand Farm in Fargo on Thursday, June 8.
“We retrofitted with
to get extra correct with our seed depth and in addition we’ve Section Control, particular person downforce for every row, simply you may get that seed precisely the place you wish to put it.”
Section Control is a characteristic from
that reduces overlaps and skips in planting and spraying.
“What Section Control does is on a planter, if you’re going over a place that you already planted, it automatically tells those sections to shut off so you’re not overseeding two spots, it saves on a seed cost,” Gorder stated, including that it helps in spraying, too. “You avoid damage to your crop from overexposure to chemical and also avoid skips so you don’t have a weed escape to take away your yield in the field.”
Gorder stated their upgrades have been all about pace.
“In the Red River Valley, in North Dakota in general, I would say our planting windows are so short, it’s like, as soon as it’s time to go, you want to make sure you can get the crop in as fast as possible,” Gorder stated.
Gorder stated when he graduated from the University of North Dakota in 2013, his father-in-law requested if he would assist with planting the following day. He has been part of the farming operation since then. He additionally has a land brokerage and gear public sale firm.
“Right before I got there, we adopted some data management technology, which looking back has driven a lot of our decisions since then,” Gorder stated. “So, that was a really big hurdle for us or a tool for us to get because we could accurately track everything we’ve done for each field from from year to year, to help make decisions on where you felt you were strong and where you felt we needed some attention.”
While being a reasonably early adopter of recent know-how, Kyle Courtney of Oakes, North Dakota, admitted there are drawbacks.
“I like it when a $3 sensor makes my planter cease for six hours,” he stated to laughter from the group.
He stated his favourite tractor on the farm dates again to 1980. “Because if anything goes wrong, then I can fix it, and I could have it back up and running,” Courtney stated. “The technology on these new pieces of equipment, you have to hire a tech to come out, hope you can get them in a timely fashion and they’re charging $175 an hour to hook it up to a computer and flip the switch.”
Jeff Beach / Agweek
, an experimental mission to develop know-how with a farm close to Casselton, North Dakota, to check autonomous gear, is attempting to determine these sort of ache factors within the business to assist overcome them.
In an earlier panel, Matt Erickson of Farm Credit Services, described know-how developments as serving to farmers observe the markets, analyze their margins and never essentially slicing prices, however “optimizing costs.”
“So let’s say, for fertilizer, we don’t put any additional fertilizer that we don’t need, and a lot of that is because of technology and the use of optimization,” he stated.
Reach Agweek reporter Jeff Beach at jbeach@agweek.com or name 701-451-5651.
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