With more than 250,000 acres of crop application history, Paul Arends with CHS in Marshall has a good understanding of the accuracy his farmer customers expect of him as he wheels either a Terragator dry fertilizer unit, or one of the AgChem liquid units from field to field and farm to farm.
When Arends started with Cenex in 1996, GPS farming was still in its infancy. In fact foam markers from boom ends was the guidance system.
Their first “electronic mechanism” for their crop application units was the “light bar,” a device enabling the operator to keep his rig centered after making turnarounds.
There is no time clock during the application season, be it spring or fall. The window for applying crop protection products is usually narrow. That means operators work long hours to provide timely and accurate work. An upgrade to auto-steering technology seemed the next logical step to lessen operator fatigue and maintain accuracy especially with machines getting bigger and booms getting wider.
Crop protection is a huge business for CHS. Besides the Marshall facility, it also has locations at Ruthton and Tracy running a total of 11 Terragator units and eight Ag-Chem liquid units, each now equipped with Raven auto-steering systems.
“These units give us six-inch to 12-inch application accuracy. When you’re running rigs with booms up to 100-feet wide, that’s pretty amazing,” said Arends, recently recognized by AGCO as one of four finalists in its Ag-Chem Operator of the Year program.
“We just added the auto-steer units a couple years ago and they are wonderful. The light bar keeps us centered each pass, and with the auto-steer you just touch the ‘release’ button as you make your turnaround. It automatically steers your rig back again with no overlap, no skips, no misses.
“The auto-steer definitely reduces stress. Just hit the button and you’re back on track. You can watch your booms to make certain everything is working good. I would say the system is 50 percent easier on us operators.”
Their Terragator rigs are equipped with 70-foot booms for the dry fertilizer work; the Ag-Chem liquid units have 90-foot to 100-foot booms. Now they’re also into variable-rate application work with a new dry rig added to their lineup last year. Plug into the Raven monitor a yield map of the particular field and this rig adjusts fertilizer rates on the go. Arends said they did about 10,000 acres of variable-rate work this fall.
He credits GPS technology as a big winner for both farmers and commercial applicator firms like CHS. “You’re not wasting chemical and you’re avoiding skips. Every square foot in a given field is treated accurately. I think it helps everybody. Farmers today collect files as they combine. Transferring that file to our fertilizer units lets us do our application work even more accurately.”
A continual challenge is that farmers are making management decisions for next year mostly based on what happened this year. Multi-year cropping data from yield maps generated as the crop is combined greatly sharpens those decisions. Sharing those files with commercial applicators using rigs with auto-steer and variable-rate applications enables them to provide exceptional service.
