CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — When Martin Barbre got his first look three years ago at a system that would drive his tractor for him, he didn’t buy the device — or the premise that it would cut costs on his farm.
“When they first came out with them and we first looked at it, it seemed like a fancy gadget,” said Barbre, 53, who grows corn and soybeans in southern Illinois.
But with the cost of fuel, seeds, fertilizer and just about everything else it takes to grow his crops rising fast, Barbre quickly came around after he started using the global positioning system to drive his tractor a year and a half ago. “As soon as we used it, we realized the benefits,” he said.
American grain farmers are enjoying the highest crop prices of their lives, but they don’t expect that to last forever. As a hedge against the inevitable downturn, owners of mid-size farms like Barbre’s — and even some smaller-scale farmers — are investing in technology that’s increasingly integrated.
Large-scale farmers have used GPS-based automated steering for tractors, sensors that probe soil for nutrients and moisture and other gadgets since the late 1990s to cut expenses and increase production. It wasn’t until the past five years or so, however, that the savings that owners of smaller and midsize farms could realize from using high-end technology would significantly offset their rising costs, said Dan Davidson, an agronomist with agricultural-data company DTN in Omaha, Neb.
But now fertilizer used by corn and soybean farms costs almost double what it did two years ago, while seeds and fuel cost almost 50 percent more, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Meanwhile, the cost of auto-steering systems has remained relatively flat the past few years, and in some cases it has fallen. Systems that now typically cost from a few thousand dollars to $25,000 used to cost up to $40,000.
With auto-steering, a farmer manually drives the perimeter of a field to map its boundaries so a GPS gadget can direct the tractor to carve near-perfectly straight rows. By cutting down on overlap, the system saves fuel, and it means the same ground won’t be planted twice or sprayed unnecessarily with fertilizer or pesticides.
Barbre estimates that using auto-steering on his 4,000 acres has cut his fuel costs up to 5 percent. “That’s maybe 30, 50 cents an acre,” he said. “Over 4,000 acres, that adds up.”
Yield mapping, which tracks how much corn or soybeans parts of his fields produce and which he’s used for more than 10 years, brings him an extra $30 or $35 on every acre of corn. He figures he’s spent about $14,000 on it over the years, buying and upgrading hardware and software, for a net benefit of $60,000 to $70,000 or more per year on 2,000 acres of corn.
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