Everything Was Perfect Until This Happened...

Morning dogs. Apparently Larry's coming with. I think so. I think it's got two sprouts coming out of it. I don't remember that from other years. Usually it sends a root down about an inch and then it sprouts and goes up. Is that hooked? No, I think it's just growing up towards the sun. You planted a seed upside down. Oh, had the planter upside down. Time to fire up the German Shepherd. Oh, she started early. Get right to it this morning. I'm going to put some diesel in here. We're down to the point where we can see some light at the end of the tunnel. We're about half done with soybeans. All of our corn is in. So we really only have a few more days of going here. We're going to fuel up here and move down south to our south fields a little bit farther away. Dad's going to bring the fuel trailer down. We've got the rock picker, the roller and the field cultivator all down there right now already. Dad's even got the spring mostly caught up, so that's a good thing with our pre-emerge. That'll give us more time to get to it here when we start spring post-emerge. Before I leave the yard, I gotta show you guys the new additions to the herd. Morning keepers, this is it. These are the eight additions to the chicken herd. So we're gonna run eight pairs this year. We had 16 eggs on the incubator. We ended up getting eight chicks. We don't know yet who's a rooster and who's not. So that'll add a bunch to the herd. We'll have a few more eggs this summer. See if we got any cool roosters. Corn and soybean prices just aren't where they need to be right now to make up what it costs to grow the things. So building the chicken herd really is the best option for floating this farm right now. Onyx coming to punch into work. He's gonna go run the roller just for a little while before Jim gets here. And then Jim's gonna take a roller and Onyx is going to switch to the move some chemical around keep all of us moving it takes it takes a guy to put fires out you need you need a fireman back one back to pto enable epg fill the bowls i got an issue see that line that looks like my marker line it's actually about 15 inches off from center of the planter so it's not my marker line it's row 12. She's a bit compacted to the point that I cannot physically move it by hand so i'm going to get a pry bar get that out of there but i don't know why it happened because i don't see a rock in there or anything but it is clogged full and i believe the scraper is broke there as well i don't know if the scraper broke and that's what caused it or if the scraper broke because of it there we go at least it's cold windy out that is plugged holy cow oh man you know what that scraper is going to have to be replaced anyway let's just get that off of there oh it's too tight because it's so fast forward i hope i don't have more problems here then what i'm thinking now what caused it this would be a nice time to have an impact gun with gauge wheel and arm look okay brush that she's stuck in there this might be the tightest i've ever had a roll pack up on me something's got to be going on is this scraper okay yeah that's fine not even a rock in there maybe it's a scraper so this scraper right here this is what scrapes the mud or whatever gets onto these row units as they spin as the openers spin i've never actually broke one like that it's been a long time since i broke one period but usually they break all the way through it's still they're kind of doing its job with half the tension so i don't know if that's what caused it or if that broke because of it either way i got to fix it i've got a set of these one left and one right in the cab just for this reason luckily it's about the easiest thing to fix that there ever could be it's just a single 10 millimeter bolt yeah it springs on in there out with the old in with the new if i remember right also this might be the one that had jumped out of its pocket earlier this year which i had never seen before so maybe maybe there's something going on anyway i'm gonna check that setting on the openers my insurance card here well that's close enough there's not anything going on there now why did you do that and can i trust you to not do it again oh got my glove what the f**k don't seem right i guess that's still on there we go now something something doesn't seem right in here whether this bushings wore out or something seems weird i'm thinking this will this is way looser than i would normally run it yeah this bushing is wore out so this will get stiff spots in it and doesn't want to float free so i just set it looser right now hoping it'll get the job done for the moment but ultimately for whatever reason that bushing really wore out which is not a difficult thing to fix but it needs to be fixed so i got to get some parts i better make sure my t handle is in the right spot on that row i got to get some parts and fix that but for now i'm hoping i can get away with it for the day it won't take too long to find out if i can get away with it or not now our whole boat is floating uh you've got an extra 30 minutes on seed if you have something else going on i had to tear a roll apart still got 20 to 25 before i seed time we are going to switch varieties of soybeans here so we'll have a good test with a couple of really strong varieties i would say that's pretty close to empty this one's also pretty dang close that's good i'm loaded again that is one of those farmer dad jokes that will just never get old even better than being full on seed here comes my lunch hard-boiled eggs and a it was cut can you see that it was cut by the opener discs i wonder if it's been that way since the day that it jumped out look at the angle that it's wore at that is something that i'm gonna have to keep an eye on i could be overthinking it there's either something else going on there or it's as simple as that thing didn't get installed correctly when we were going over stuff in the winter because i'm pretty sure that's the row that was like halfway jumped out on day one or two this year and maybe it just has not been has not been correct since then i don't know i'm gonna eat a cheeseburger morning dog seems pretty calm out here this morning morning birds there he is there's the man we are finally getting some heat and and sunshine but with that that means it's the time of year where i'm going to basically start sweating right away in the mornings from the moment i leave the house until the moment i walk back into the house i just do i ended up setting my phone down yesterday after that sneeze and just planted away it was kind of nice i did have more fights with row 12 but it was mostly self-inflicted and i don't want to talk old muddy paws here found herself some soybeans for breakfast she must have gone for a swim in the creek found some fun artifacts on one of our field approaches last night got a folding chair a bike tire beautiful picture and a broken up tv that somebody left right at the entrance of one of our fields so thank you for that very meaningful oh we got our seat loaded up for the day i just need to stop at the house and get my co-pilot there's a little artifact oh that's on there but on that hard onyx is gonna fire this thing up and take this we're down to only about 50 acres of tillage left oh there's a missing one we better get on there shoot i was hoping to get away with not having to do that this morning other than that couple shanks that are a little bit bent that i'll fix another time but i got that missing one way back there i climbed under here to mount this on there put everything together but the deal is this shank is really bent along with this one alongside it probably hooked the same rock i'm going to let the shank do the tillage because the shank is junk anyway and we only have 50 acres left and we're not at home i don't have the impact with and i don't have a spare shank and i want to get the planter moving that shank is junk anyway and if i put that new point on there it's probably going to wreck that new point so this is fine wow you get behind these trees where you don't have a breeze and it is an awesome day and it should be it's about time this is maybe the first morning we haven't had frost on our porch in the mornings for quite some time let the pto and the vax warm up a little bit here and go put some eyes on everything before i take off and let the tractor warm up for a minute interestingly here i downforce automation or my margin automation that's the furrow vision system that we put on here a couple of months ago before this spring so it's brand new it's got actual cameras that are reading inside the furrow they are seeing the seeds they're seeing the depth of the trench they're reading the quality of the trench and they're taking that information and deciding automatically what your your downforce needs to different fields different soils different soil structures all of that is going to go into deciding exactly how much margin you need which is the amount of weight hydraulically pushing down on the row units it used to be that we would tell it a number say 160 maybe 180 pounds was pretty common for us in our conditions most of the time i would tell it 160 or 180 then what the hydraulic units do is they're reading and constantly making sure that they're applying 160 or 180 pounds more than necessary to keep the row units in the ground and keep the ride quality consistent because the smoother every row unit rides the better of a job it's going to do at singulating that seed which ultimately means better space plants healthier plants higher yields so those row units need they don't you don't want them to chatter they need to ride nice and level so we've got a ride quality gauge right here and right now it's reading well there's a zero there's a nine back to 99 every once in a while what you're seeing that red flashing is a great time to put the camera on it the red flashing is when a specific row unit probably hits a rock or a certain bump and we're actually still calibrating so this takes a few minutes to calibrate it's up to 185 pounds right now so what it's doing is it sees it knows okay our ride quality is a little bit poor yet let's increase see if we can get our ride quality up so it's gone up 50 pounds since i turned the camera on in a few more minutes it's up to 195 now which is getting closer to where i finished last night which is this field is much higher than what i would normally run but when i checked it yesterday it's not creating any compaction in the furrow the ride quality is good i had fields where i was doing 120 or 130 pounds and i've had fields like where i was doing 270 280 in areas so it knows how to read the soil and the ride quality and all of that and tell me what my downforce is supposed to be now i double checked that i've gone back to doing it manually we've checked the furrow consistency and made sure that we're not getting extra compaction in the made sure because you want a nice and nice formed furrow but you don't want it smeared or compacted there's a balance there and that's what this is helping you find i've also had fields that are so dry and powdery that it will go up to 300 pounds of margin or 300 pounds of automated downforce and it realizes that the field is so powdery it still can't create a great furrow the ride quality is fine at 120 pounds but it's trying to create that better furrow it gets up there and says well it's too dry and powdery i can't compact this at all i can't get a furrow out of it so it'll drop it back down to where it's just getting good ride quality so you get good seat placement in it knows there's no sense in putting all that extra hydraulic pressure down and running that extra that extra force in the tractor the hydraulic power because it's not gaining you anything so the system does a pretty dang good in my experience so far of knowing pretty close to the best balance as far as where that should be and it took me it took me a few hundred acres to trust that it took me getting out of the tractor what it really took was a couple of guys explaining to me really how the system works and why i see what i'm seeing and that really helped a lot but so far i'm really happy with it i'm excited about it it's helped me to understand better what i need to look for to know how much margin or how much downforce that i'm supposed be running it'll read the depth too i kind of forgot to mention that at once to read a consistent depth now this is reading the depth of the furrow not of where the seat is so there are some discrepancies there which you can put in an offset and change that this is an actual video from the left side wing in the furrow and when i lift up here you're going to see that go away when it leaves the furrow so there you can see it's just hanging it happens kind of quick that camera is actually taking way more images than what we see here it's got a laser in it that's reading the depth of the furrow if i go back here i can switch to the center camera or the right wing camera i can also turn on my residue analysis and it will highlight the residue that it sees in the furrow now that's more useful i think for no-till guys so they can adjust their row cleaners it'll actually automate the row cleaners for you as well if you want to do that but when we're full tillage on our farm we're incorporating the residue all the way through the top several inches of the soil so there's not a whole lot that i can change about that because my residue is throughout the soil profile what you see on top is also what it's like at two three four inches deep but for some guys in the right environment under the right management practices that could be pretty valuable and this is a brand new system they're still working on this they're still making updates to it they're still learning about exactly what kind of tweaks they can make to make it better so this is really its first year seeing some of the fields out here understand in real world conditions how this thing works by next year i think it's going to be wide open there's going to be a lot of this out there if you're interested talk to your local dealer tell them you want to know more about furrow vision i should add that you can add it to used planters that's what we did here this planter wasn't brand new we put furrow vision on it after the fact so it is a kit that you can definitely add to your current planter i mean depending on i'm sure there are some limitations that's something you'd have to ask your dealer about i'm sorry i got so windy there just sometimes when technology works well i'm really into it onyx has finished up tillage other than a 40 acre field that we have up by home that needs some work so he's gonna go roll some right now level some land before i get to it over the hill there over yonder we've got a 40 to 45 acre field that had a lot of drain tile work done to it we took some trees down that's gonna be the last piece we get to before we finish everything up dad's actually up there with the mendeco storm right now leveling it all off trying to kind of see what we have to work with there's some piles of trees there it's gonna be a little bit of a mess but ultimately it's gonna clean that field up a lot 130 acres later and i need more more more of the seed beans i didn't get close enough onyx is on his way over too well he's gonna take that he finished rolling in this big field so he's gonna head over to trap shooting practice so he's gone for the rest of the day there we go now we're lining up a little bit better the only thing you can't do with a remote for this thing is speed this engine up otherwise you can pretty well do everything else and six eight minutes later i'm loaded and we are rolling again i'm gonna go in here and i'm gonna change my variety to what i just put in which is the 1825e right there and that's gonna show my map there we go now we'll see how many sneezes i got in me for the next seed load seed load no sneezes didn't take any i've already done my next 80 acres 88 acres actually to be exact and i ran out of seed now i'm filled up with seed you guys have seen the seed tender so much you don't need to see it anymore but this is what you guys are really missing thunder i'm getting down there on def and diesel as well so why not use a double hose here and double team this tractor and get it all filled up that's how you get it done efficiently any more than enough to finish the remaining couple hundred acres down here and i don't want to run that pump dry so we're gonna call that enough got plenty of seed plenty of fuel got a podcast all queued up time to go back over that hill and finish this you ought to head home with a rock picker sometime tomorrow i'll see what you think because it's a mess or what i'll take a look at it but it might be something we farm around this year and try to clean it up over the summer a market that nobody else was targeting blue collar hard-working people that actually needed a prop here we go i didn't think i was going to make it on seed but this is it this is going to finish off this 414 acre field right there there cannot be hardly an ounce of seed left i can't believe i made it but i did this field is actually a mile from north to south and i'm down at the south end so rather than drive all the way across the field again i'm gonna drive around the block to get over to my ride you ought to see me back the boat up at a landing i don't mean to brag but i never have to reset well see you later