In this testimonial, Roger Culpepper, the 68‑year‑old property manager at Realtree Farms, explains how a John Deere tractor equipped with GPS guidance and auto‑steer has transformed his planting operations. He describes the system’s ability to map fields, name them, and display the exact track taken, highlighting missed spots with color so no area is left unseeded. The GPS integrates with a 10‑foot seed drill and can be set to match any implement width—such as a 35‑foot sprayer—to ensure complete coverage without striping. Auto‑steer lets the tractor follow the set line, turn around, and return to the same path without manual steering, dramatically reducing fatigue. Roger praises the comfort and efficiency gains and recommends contacting SunSouth for installation.
Chapters
Hi y'all, I'm Roger Culpepper. I'm property manager here at Realtree Farms. It's that time of year we're getting ready to plant. Man, with this John Deere tractor and that seed drill, it sure goes good together and makes work a whole lot easier for me. And now I'm old school. I've been on a tractor a long time. I'm 68 years old and been on one since I guess— actually, I got on a tractor first When I begged my daddy to let me get on a tractor, I couldn't press the clutch in, but he would let me bush hog, and I'd just have to just idle it down and bog the tractor down to stop it, 'cause I couldn't stop it. Man, things have changed so much. It just, besides the comfort of this tractor, man, some of the things they've got going on now, we got a GPS guidance system on these things, on this tractor here now that they installed for me. And it is unbelievable. You can go around the perimeter of your field and have it set in there and you name each field and then you just pull up the name of the field. As you're covering that field, it will show you the track that you took. And just like I've got it set up for this 10-foot seed drill and it will actually show you, it'll fill in with color as you go. And if you see any spot that you skip, it will actually show up on there. So when you get through with the field, you want a solid painted picture, not nothing with any skips in it. So you can use it with a, obviously with a drill, with any plows. Spraying is great, especially when you got a sprayer, 'cause you can set up the width. Just like if you got a 35-foot wide sprayer that's spraying a 35 width, then you can set 35 feet on there and it'll show you that you covered that whole field. You ain't got no dem stripes left. Another cool thing is it's got auto steer on here, so you can set it. You can use it with auto steer or without, but you can set it and it will take you to the end of the field. You can turn around, you can just let go of the steering wheel, and it will— it'll guide you right back down, just like with this 10-foot drill, it'll get back and get on the same line you just come down. It'll, it'll be 10 foot over and you just, you can let go of the steering wheel and do the same thing when you get to the end, turn around and it'll just take you and cover the whole field without you ever really touching the steering wheel as far as you're running the lines. And if you think you're interested in something like this, I'm going to tell you, it's really nice. Just go see the guys at SunSouth and I promise you they'll hook you up.
