Field View

Yesterday I attended the LincoPrecision spring information meeting.  Precision Seeding Technologies of Nokomis has recently merged with Linco of El Paso Illinois.  The meeting had been an annual event for Precision Seeding Technologies for a number of years.  Featured speakers were Danny Klinefelter and Mark Welch of Texas A & M University.  They will be featured in future blogs.  Justin Fleck of LincoPrecision made a good presentation on new steering options available. 

The Precision Planting people made a presentation on their new Ipad based monitor that they plan to use in the field.  the product is called field view.  It is hooked into one of their 20/20 planter monitors and used to give a row by row graphic look at what is going on with your planter in real time.  The monitor can be difficult to watch at times without the graphics so this looks like huge improvement. You can also use it to make notes, take pictures, and monitor exactly where you are in the fied with a Google Earth background.  I like the idea of using off the shelf products in the Ag world.  My opinion is that precision equipment is unduly expensive because they use custom made hardware.    I am looking for more farm functional IPad capabilities in the near future.

Precision Planting field tested the IPad for durability and found that it is very durable unless you step on the screen or throw a wrench on it or something silly.  The good news is that data is stored on the cloud and the Ipad is replaceable at a fraction of the cost of most ruggedized monitors if you do break it.  Data from multiple sources can be combined very easily.  Yield monitor functionality is expected in 2013.