The Kilmer family in Illinois talks with John Deere's Justin Blanchette about how precision agriculture technology changed their farming. They explain how data and GPS-guided equipment cut waste, improved their harvest decisions, and made their operations more efficient.
Sam.
I'm Darrell Kilmer and I've farmed all my life in Grundy County, Illinois. Harvest is the best time of the year. You get to reap your rewards of all your hard work all year, and it's actually fun to harvest and put the crop in the bag.
My name is Tim Kilmer and I'm a farmer in North Central Illinois. We're pretty excited about this harvest. Through all the perils of the year, we're finding some pretty good crops. So we're really excited to get out there and take it out.
My name is Dan Kilmer and I'm a farmer in North Central Illinois. Things are going real smooth. The technology is really helping us right now. Dad's been running auto track in the combine and that's kind of new to him and he's really enjoying it. It's worked out really well. In fact, sometimes it's hard to imagine going back before we had it. It's pretty amazing how the technology improves our farms and improves our quality.
I'm Justin Blanchette, the Precision Ag Business manager with ahw. This year, the Kilmers have a little different approach on harvest due to the fact that we've got some historical data established and we've got a fundamental understanding of how that all works.
One of the things that's really changed is we used to spend a lot of time with a notebook. You wrote handwritten notes about what you'd done, where, what you planted, where, and all the way through to harvest time, you were always running for a notebook.
Originally, about the only technology we had was a yield monitor in the combine and it would just flash a number and that's all you had to go by.
So throughout the 2017 growing season, Kilmer's experienced several benefits from the technology incorporation. Not only the benefit of saving the inputs with section control, but having to do a lot of things. Twice this year we saved on those inputs. Both times, the maps, tremendous benefit throughout the scouting season. All summer we're out checking fields. Tremendously valuable.
The technology shows that you can take a good farm and you can make it a great farm.
Technology. It allows us to do things that we could never do before. The field that we're standing in right now was planted after dark. The planters took off and with autotrac, they did the perimeters around the field just the way they should be, and the rows were all straight. You would never have known it hadn't been planted in daylight hours.
The introduction of technology is something that has a learning curve to it and until you start doing it and see the output, you don't recognize the adjustments that you can make and tweak to have better output.
Well, one good example we had a year ago, we had a farm that on the yield map showed a wet area in the field where we needed to add some drainage. So we decided to put some field tile in and drain that particular portion of the field. This technology shows you exactly where those poor spots are so you can make improvements for the future.
The technology was a huge, huge help this planting season. And now that we're into harvest, it really takes a lot of the stress off operating the machine like and do an A plus job.
The most rewarding part of the past year for me has been watching Kilmers embrace the technology. And from my seat in the ballpark, we've had a very successful endeavor here.
The use of the technology always helps us make better decisions for the future.
We've always tried to do the best job of farming we know how. But adopting this technology and learning how to apply it better and better over time has really brought us to the next plateau where we can do a better job of farming now than we ever could before we had it.
I think the sky's the limit as it relates to the future of technology. With Kilmer Farms, Dan and Tim being of the age that they are recognizing they have a long future ahead of them, I think that technology will play an instrumental part in their success.
We've really been able to do some really amazing things that I never thought were even possible in the field. And it's been really a fun educational experience for us. If you want to be on the cutting edge of farming and really be progressive and do the best job, you need to get some of this technology.
For as long as people have been farming and for as short of a time as technology has been used, it's hard to imagine ever farming without it.
Farming is a great life. You get to live in the country, you get to work with the land, and you get to feed the world.
