Are some of us being foolish

[Clever Dic]

Just wondering if it's me or do others feel we are being lead by machinery dealers/agricultural manufacturing industry into a situation of diminishing returns for our money.
My recent case and still ongoing of the great benefits of the rush for more technology is my new fertilizer spreader. I have just bought a Kvernland Geodisc machine full weighing,auto shut off ,sectional shutting,the mutts nuts. For my Gps I was on patchwork blackbox as it controlled my previous machine. Experience has told me that getting this stuff to work is never what the salesman said so I gave myself 6 weeks for dealer manufacturer and patchwork to get it all singing. To start with a whole multitude of fresh cabling had to be installed none of which was mentioned or even known at the time by the parties concerned and many visits to get it all talking. O as an aside patchwork upgraded my web track 2 cloud storage to web track 3 lost all my stored info but added various other farms from up and down the country to my records. To get applied fertilizer info for last year having spent a fortune on all this techno feast I had to use the operators written diary notes ,I would add as well that this was meant to be fixed some time ago but this morning when we synced he first days spreading not only was all this crap still in my records but it wiped the application jobs and fields from the memory stick in the process which was not discovered till the machine was back in the field 12 miles from home. Tonight still not fully working.
I am totally guilty at buying in to these improvements and wanting to be progressive but is it smoke and mirrors are we really seeing better crops ,higher yields, less £s spent on crops and cultivation and is all this technology worth the heartache because you can bet your life that in my experiences it's the non working technology that stops the job getting done.
Bit cheesed by it all tonight.

 

[solo]

There's a lot going for the "KISS" theory.
keep it simple stupid. Thats mostly what I use but when i upgrade ? Like most things they are brilliant when working, but can be a right pia if they don't.

 

[Treemover]

Well, it was all done by man and horse at one time. But to think how much was done in the 70s, with between 70 and 90 hp; does make you wonder if were really chasing the right approach.

It's a valid question!

 

[Darren]

It seems a lot of this new tech is like fishing tackle. Designed more to catch the angler than more fish.
Most cereal yields have been on a plateau the past 20 yrs. And after sitting through potatoe growing meetings the past couple of yrs I seem to get the impression that lots of people are forgetting the basics. Soil, weather etc. so @Clever Dic maybe we should all take a step back from this high tech stuff as sometimes it seems it creates more problems than it solves

 

[SilliamWhale]

I think things like all singing fert spreaders are perfect bits of kit to have a contractor using. He can get a nice long season out of it with dairy, cereals, maize etc.

 

[Feldspar]

Just wondering if it's me or do others feel we are being lead by machinery dealers/agricultural manufacturing industry into a situation of diminishing returns for our money.
My recent case and still ongoing of the great benefits of the rush for more technology is my new fertilizer spreader. I have just bought a Kvernland Geodisc machine full weighing,auto shut off ,sectional shutting,the mutts nuts. For my Gps I was on patchwork blackbox as it controlled my previous machine. Experience has told me that getting this stuff to work is never what the salesman said so I gave myself 6 weeks for dealer manufacturer and patchwork to get it all singing. To start with a whole multitude of fresh cabling had to be installed none of which was mentioned or even known at the time by the parties concerned and many visits to get it all talking. O as an aside patchwork upgraded my web track 2 cloud storage to web track 3 lost all my stored info but added various other farms from up and down the country to my records. To get applied fertilizer info for last year having spent a fortune on all this techno feast I had to use the operators written diary notes ,I would add as well that this was meant to be fixed some time ago but this morning when we synced he first days spreading not only was all this crap still in my records but it wiped the application jobs and fields from the memory stick in the process which was not discovered till the machine was back in the field 12 miles from home. Tonight still not fully working.
I am totally guilty at buying in to these improvements and wanting to be progressive but is it smoke and mirrors are we really seeing better crops ,higher yields, less £s spent on crops and cultivation and is all this technology worth the heartache because you can bet your life that in my experiences it's the non working technology that stops the job getting done.
Bit cheesed by it all tonight.

I completely empathise with this experience. Did roughly the same last year, except with an Amazone Profis Hydro - GPS section control, the lot. The concept sounded great. Then it turned out we had to pay extra for brackets to fit to the tractor. Then £800 for a wiring harness. Then the tractor didn't have enough hydraulic flow to drive the discs properly, so we were missing bits at either end of the field. I tried to be clever by reducing the outside disc speed on the headland combined with reducing the rate and ended up having a very thin crop in the outside 6m. Then we swapped tractors, which has required more wiring, lots of time on the phone to technical specialists, an autoguide ready tractor, lots of workshop time, a new satellite receiver, and some complicated solution involving Power Beyond. All this and we still are not 100% sure it's going to turn on when the day comes.

Does make you wonder whether the old PTO driven spreader with almost no electronics is that much worse. Less to go wrong and it can be understood by someone who doesn't need a pilot's licence!

 

[Chae1]

Would be great to have a simple spreader you could hitch on and go! Takes about an hour by the time you've it all set up to go.

 

[Yale]

My old Vicon works fine.

Open spool spread.

Close spool shut off.



Guess what it will be replaced with.........................another simple Vicon..........with no electrics.

 

[YorkshireAndrew]

Our neighbour had a GPS thingy on his drilling tractor - what a dog's dinner it was when it came up !

 

[suffolksmallholder]

To OP. NO! Get rid.
SS

 

[franklin]

I keep looking at these fancy spreaders. Just have a feeling that a few good washes down would have electric gubbins shorting out and that lot. Will stick with the old Kuhn 1131 which has lasted 10 years with only a couple of slight bubbly patches in the paint. Probably worth what we paid for it anyway!

But basic tractor autosteer is a wonderful thing. Bracket on steering wheel. Whole lot can be swapped to another machine in about 15 minutes. Just plugs into the cig lighter.

 

[bert]

Got a 10 year old amazone here, headland limiter on it, 3 spools and any idiot operating gives even crops every year. Cant see the technology ever really paying for it unless your doing thousands of acres

 

[Clive]

some tech is good and make / save you money

most is rubbish though

 

[DRC]

Once your on the merry go round, you can't get off, and will be tied in to more and more technology.
I can't see me on 400 acres wanting to bother spending money on techy stuff. It may be my age, early 50's, or just that i can't see where the payback is going to come from. My son laughed when i changed the tractor, but didn't have a gearing system that required touch screen. I also had the simplest control box i could get, on a new drill, as i know how big my fields are and what seed rate i'm using, without it being flashed up at me.
Horses for courses, i suppose. Although i firmly believe, that a lot of it is driven by the usual farmer keeping up with the jones's and sales talk.

 

[Mr Charisma]

bought a kuhn 30.1 spreader a coupe of years ago ,,,,,, the salesman was surprised that I only wanted basic spec saying that was the first he had sold like that ,,,,, told him I like to keep everything nice and simple
and to be honest it still does the same job as a bells and whisles jobby , all i have to do is to drive at the same fwd speed ,,,, hardly rocket science

 

[nxy]

I think the important thing about "gizmos" on machinery is I am happy to have them and use them as long as they are not the only means of making the machine work. They are there to make the job better/easier/quicker, the moment they give grief, prevent you working or slow you down, I must be able to turn them off.

I actually think the vast majority of info that goes into and comes out of these clever machines is never looked at and does little to improve the bottom line.

 

[tullah]

Got one of those . Hitch up , single spool does the hydraulic shut off, 10 minutes doing a manual calibration and go for it. Never stopped me in 6 years.

 

[nxy]

Has anybody tried to order a drill without a control box? Kverneland will not let you. If I have a 6m drill and spray at 24m, I would rather block off two tubes on one side of a drill and never have a problem with tramlines. You even get some spare parts when you take off the unused tines.

 

[Feldspar]

It must be said though that when these systems works they do offer advantages and they aren't apparent on the first day when everything appears way too complicated.

We can spread at 16 kph when conditions are good, can freely change the revs of the tractor and run at just over tick-over because everything is hydraulic, can spread in the dark if necessary without too much problem, shouldn't have to steer next year, calculate fields sizes accurately (our old drilling acreages were quite a bit out compared to the true figure) and get more done in a day and this year hopefully save some fertiliser. The important qualification is: when everything works! Tricky to say if it's saving money though, and that's over several thousand acres a year.

 

[tw15]

It does make you wonder is all of this high tech stuff is worth the expense .
A bit like this controlled traffic farming method by the time people have spent a fortune on new kit to make the system work they would probably do well in buying some lgp tyres and tread lightly . I can see the benefit in gps and section control . It must be more justifiable for larger estates but for a smaller farm some of the savings being branded by the sales reps don't stack up on techy stuff .