Tim and Dan Kilmer navigate a brutal planting season in North Central Illinois with help from John Deere technology. Adverse weather forced extensive replanting, but precision farming tools helped them manage the chaos and keep moving forward.
Sam I'm Tim Kilmer and I'm a farmer in North Central Illinois. The first planting, the weather was right and the calendar was right and the ground was working good until the weather turned on us. The rain started coming in and the weather turned cold and it just took its toll on the corn and it finished it off.
My name is Dan Kilmer and I'm a farmer in North Central Illinois. In our farming career, we've never seen anything quite like this. Sometimes Mother Nature can throw a curve ball at you. Hi, I'm Justin Blanchette, Precision Ag business manager with ahw. The best description would be we'd had a flood, just too much rain and not enough time for it to dissipate. So after having the entire crop planted, the Kilmers determined that nearly half of all that they had completed was going to require a replant. This planting season had its problems. We definitely had to make good decisions along the way to straighten out things that went wrong before we started to replant. I sat the boys down and I talked about stress management with them because we had a lot of decisions to make in a hurry and we needed to make them right. Well, the second planting came up perfect. I think every kernel grew, the stands are really good. This planting season required a lot of experience and a lot of hours. We're very thankful for the technology that widened our planning window this year because every minute counted. A lot of the technology that we used for replanting was the same as we used the first time. One key thing that we found is with the autotrac, it kept our compaction from the tractor in exactly the same place as it did the first time. So that was really beneficial to where we were planning.
In a non compacted area really does an a sub inch job along all the property lines and along all the Creek beds. The MyAnalyzer app helped significantly when I was scouting fields this spring because I could scout instantly and I knew exactly where I was and it saved me a lot of time. Guessing.
I see there having been multiple benefits of the technology given the circumstances that we had this spring. And primarily they were able to save seed twice. I mean, the section control did a phenomenal job of cutting their costs the first time, and that carries over into the second time. Another tremendous benefit of utilizing the technology this year was the ability to be able to document what you did, where and when. That is all information that you're able to share with your insurance provider and escalate claims, make that whole process a lot less painful. The technology makes us more efficient, makes us more productive.
On my nitrogen applicator I had section control and auto track, so that allowed me to not overlap any nitrogen into the headlands. It would automatically shut on and off.
I'm using the technology to map where I'm spraying in the field, and that's very helpful when you get into really odd shaped fields so you're not wasting any herbicide overlapping. I'm using my autotrac guidance lines from the.
