[AT] OT-now GPS

Wed Apr 8 06:11:41 PDT 2015

I pretty much stayed with the seat of my pants on this smallish operation
but in later years I was paying a very good local custom applicator for
fertilizer application and spraying both. I think it was about $4 an acre.
He used a lot of very expensive monitors and GPS stuff. I could pay him for
a lot of years on this small farm for what I would have had to spend if I
bought any of that stuff just for me. Those expenses stopped there at the
$4. I had no equipment or fuel cost and jobs that I would have spent 2 days
doing he did in about an hour.
One thing that I did when I was doing my own was to keep track of which
direction I drove each year and spread fertilizer at 90 degrees different
each time. I had decided that I was getting bands of heavier application
and thin stripes by driving the same each year. Switching the direction of
travel 90 degrees each year took that out.
I learned a very long time ago to have a salt shaker handy when other guys
(especially some of the big guys) were telling me how much money or time
something was saving them so that I could take it with a grain of salt...
:-)
I had several other reasons to hire that work done. Not the least of which
was that I was always working at other things myself, many of which payed
me better than the $4 an acre I was paying for custom application.
Another big reason was that I suddenly noticed that an excessive number of
the farmers that I grew up around had died of cancer. Many were
unbelievably careless in handling farm chemicals. One custom applicator and
I were talking about it one day and he said that he had recently had a
number of polyps removed from inside of his nose. While we were talking he
was pouring some 2-4-D concentrate into the tank and it was running across
his hand and down to his elbow and he just ignored it completely. One time
when I was working in seed corn research for Garst Seeds we were planting a
4 acre research plot in southwestern Indiana and the farm owner and his
grown son were getting ready to plant soybeans. The son had been disking
all morning and spraying Trefflan (sp?) at the same time. The son was
heavily covered from head to toe with the stuff and was as yellow as a fire
hydrant... No eye-wear, no respirator... Nothing...  (shudder)
I just decided that I wanted to remove that exposure from my lifestyle.

Greg, You know where I live in Central Indiana, I could probably find your
son a rock pretty quickly here.
:-)
The great glacier belched about 6 miles south of me and they have a lot of
rocks there. There is also a place about 15 miles west of me (called "Rock
Lane") where it burped pretty good. The funny thing is those folks fought
those things forever and made big piles of them but in recent years they
have sold many of them and even have a minor problem with people stopping
and stealing some of them for their yards.
Brown County Indiana about 40 miles south-west of me is glacial terminal
moraine and pretty rough (and pretty) but here, I am still on the edge of
the prairie and we are mostly flat...

On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 7:05 AM, Henry Miller <hank at millerfarm.com> wrote:

> The laws of physics prevent the satellite only systems from getting more
> accurate than about 16 feet. You know how on a hot day things sometimes get
> wavy off in the distance? Same thing happens to satellite signals, and the
> satellite is much farther away than those hazy things.
>
>  Throw in something on the ground and you can get much closer.
>
> Disclaimer, I work for John Deere on the 4600 displays. I'm not speaking
> for them though.
>
>
> On April 7, 2015 8:24:38 PM CDT, Greg Hass <ghass at m3isp.com> wrote:
> >I bought a GPS unit three years ago. Bought one of the cheaper units at
> >
> >a little over over $700. If I were doing it again, I would probably try
> >
> >to afford a $ 1500 unit.  The one I have works good for spreading
> >fertilizer and I have sprayed with it once or twice but it is somewhat
> >limited. For instance; a relative bought the more expensive unit and he
> >
> >can hook it to a sprayer controller and it will  tell the unit ground
> >speed and is more accurate on the swath width.  As was mentioned, I to
> >have noticed accuracy is greatly affected on rough ground. The book
> >says
> >to mount the antenna on the roof of the cap to get a clear view of the
> >sky; however, that far off the ground on rough ground I know the
> >antenna
> >is moving 2 feet back and forth and the reading in the tractor is
> >unstable so I just pick an average and drive accordingly. When
> >spreading
> >fertilizer I go 40 ft. swathes and it overlaps some anyway so a foot or
> >
> >two is good. Without the GPS my swathes would vary 10 or 20 feet
> >depending on which tracks I followed. The way I understand it,
> >auto-steer is a whole other beast. My cousin uses one and the way I
> >understand it, it does not operate like the GPS we are used to. His
> >uses
> >antennas placed on cell phone towers over a three county area. A couple
> >
> >of dealers in that area got together to make the system. They say the
> >satellites are not accurate for things like planting corn as their
> >system will keep the planter within a one inch spacing. This system is
> >not cheap as my cousin says the fee for tower use is about $3000 per
> >year plus the equipment to mount on the tractors is about $15,000. We
> >do have many people in our area using this system. My cousin says that
> >he figures this system saves him well over $10,000 a year in labor,
> >fuel, and extra wear caused by overlapping too much or having skips
> >which the field cultivator missed. The downside is all these people are
> >
> >working at least 1500 acres compared to my 100 so I have to stick with
> >the old ways just due to the cost.
> >            Greg Hass
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >AT mailing list
> >http://www.antique-tractor.com/mailman/listinfo/at
>
> --
> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
> _______________________________________________
> AT mailing list
> http://www.antique-tractor.com/mailman/listinfo/at
>

-- 
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Francis Robinson
aka "farmer"
Central Indiana USA
robinson46176 at gmail.com