This is a YouTube video titled "The Kilmers Ep. 2 - Farming, Family & the Future | John Deere Tech at Work" created in February 2017. It features multiple members of the Kilmer family discussing their farming operations in north central Illinois, the integration of technology to improve productivity and family life, and the importance of legacy and family in their farming business. The content includes interviews and commentary from family members and a Precision Ag business manager, focusing on the impact of technology on modern farming and family dynamics.
Sam.
I'm Tim Kilmer and this is my wife Melissa. We farm in north central Illinois. We have a one and a half year old son named Nathan that helps us out.
We've been married for four years and I am a speech language pathologist.
Family's everything. I go to work every day so that I can take care of my family and hopefully give them a better life than I started with.
This is my husband, Dan Kilmer, he's a farmer. My name's Aaron, I work in insurance and we have two children, John, who's a little more than one and Emma who's two and a half.
We love living so close to my brother Tim and my father Darrell. It's wonderful to get to work with your family like this.
You need to find ways to incorporate your family into your work. Otherwise you won't get to spend the time with your family that you really need to.
Technology has allowed Kilmer farms to be more productive, spend more time with the family, be more relaxed when we come home at night. It has also improved the quality of the job that we do on the farm.
I have seen a difference since he's been using the technology before he was a crab when he got home and now he's super happy to see us.
I'm Justin Blanchett, Precision Ag business manager with ahw. Today we're at the customer training facility where we're going to evaluate Kilmer Farms 2016 Farm and field data.
We really need to use this technology to maximize our income for the following year.
My name is Darrell Kilmer and I've farmed in Illinois all of my life. In the past, get done harvesting and you'd measure how much was in the grain bins and figure your yield out per farm and that was pretty much what your technology would be.
Kilmers prior to March of 16 really had no technology going on, so tried to tread lightly but incorporate more and more capabilities as the season went on.
At first it was very overwhelming. I'm not quite as computer savvy as my brother is and my dad is certainly not as computer savvy as me and Tim are. But it's not very hard to use once you catch on to it.
The biggest insight that I'll have for next year is certain corn and bean hybrids work better on certain soil types and the mapping really showed these hybrids which fields they belong on.
But now we have very fine tuned data that we can really make excellent decisions going forward.
From my perspective, technology has made Kilmer farms more productive, more efficient and identifying things that can be done better to continue to improve. A year ago today, when the technology incorporation at Kilmer Farms was ramping up, there was not a lot of enthusiasm on any of the participants. And it's been very rewarding to watch through the season as all of them have welcomed with open arms or embraced the utilization of it.
The Kilmers do things and they're highly observant.
As soon as you got them with.
The field, they always strive to become better. So the technology helps reaffirm some of their thoughts and it also shows some surprises that they maybe wondered in their mind what happened here, but they couldn't pinpoint it.
So basically, we're going to try to make it better every year with this new dating that we never had in the past.
Grandpa Darrell is great. He loves playing with the kids and he loves teaching them new things.
It's your history and your legacy and you're hoping to continue that on for our kids.
And our kids would be the future of that legacy after we're gone, that we would hope that they would carry on just the same as we have carried on for our family before.
I have so much pride in a family farm. It's the hard work of me, my ancestors and I look into the future of my son, hopefully, and his kids can help build and create this thing that we can all be proud of and pass from generation to generation and really hold dearly.
