From the Fields: Sidedress bar upgrade

We met with Precision Planting this morning in Fairbury to go over some plumbing options for the sidedress bar that will be set up with all of the shutoffs and the row units. There’s a lot of different options and ways that you could do it. It was nice being able to talk to them this morning and get all that figured out with their engineers there.

Basically, we can variable rate our nitrogen and our stabilizer with two different prescriptions going across the field. So, when we get up on our high ground, we can put less nitrogen if we want and less stabilizer, and when we get to the low ground we can put more stabilizer down there and maybe not as much nitrogen because it might have enough already. We can variable rate that across the field simultaneously, but separate from each other.

We’ll be able to control it at the row, so we can shut each row off individually like the planter does when you come to the end. We can also variable rate row by row. It’s also going to show us what our flow is for each row. We had no way of telling before besides raising it up on the end and looking to see if we had liquid coming out. What each row is applying will show up in the cab.

They thought it will be available for us next week just in time for where our stage of corn is. Some guys around here will start sidedressing this week. By the time it dries up around here and our corn is ready to be sidedressed it’ll be just right.

We’re also cleaning up the planting equipment and getting it put away. I think we’re verified that we’re not going to have to replant stuff now. Everything has come up.

Right after that, we had to come back and work on our planter and get it calibrated with some of the changes we made on the insecticide. We’re still working on getting that dialed in. I think we finally got that worked out and we just got finished up with that about 10 minutes ago.