Planting Soybeans

May 18


Got a couple hours of farming in after dinner.

The neighbor's 24 row planter, twin-row Great Plains.

John going to refill the planter with soybeans.

First year to use autosteer. The tractor and the planter each have a RTK GPS (±0.5") receiver and auto-steer. The big disks hanging off the back of the planter steer the planter.

Can only go an hour between refills, no 80 bushel hopper here.

Monitor central.

Planter monitor, displaying the population in the upper LH corner. (Add 000 after the 164 for number of seeds/acre)

This monitor turns the row units off/on. When the planter is in the white the row units are on. When it is in yellow it turns the row units off. The planter is divided into four zones of three rows each.

The guidance monitor, which steers the tractor and planter, is a work in progress. It would not work properly when in freeform mode (planting on a contour). Plant A-B (in a straight line) and it would work as advertised. In Freeform it would do the first round but refuse to pop a red line for the start of the second round. If one drove 150’ into the field then the red line would pop up. Then one could back up and start the round, but if one backed up too far the guidance system would lose the correct path and pop a red line to add additional end rows.

Trimble said reload the firmware but that didn’t work. The dealer got the idea to do two maps. One for the end rows and then load a new field before loading starting the rest of the field, that way Trimble wouldn’t know the end rows existed and would lay down lines as it should. That worked. Once the Trimble is working properly one will not need the Ag Leader to control the row units.

John hard at work, look mom no hands.

Just a few windmills in this neck of the woods.

Cousin Nick planting soybeans with a 16 row twin-row Great Plains.

Highway 60, Iowa style superslab. Just grateful the speed limit is 65 and that it bypasses seven towns.

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