Stop in for a cup of coffee
I just dont see how all that money is justified? Fuel saving?
A colossal waste. Just because you can doesent always mean you should.
actually, for most farmers under 1000 acres, its not, at least it'd take longer to pay for itself. For what was shown in that video. What they don't talk about in that video is the GPS guided Green star/autosteer program and row smart sense systems, or even the Precision Planting systems help a ton. Not in fuel savings. But rather in yields. Straight rows down to the 1/4 inch means less waste, plus the systems can read nutrient levels during planting and automatically adjust seed count by the foot. That translates into knowing how much fertilizer to dump where and it adjusts for foot. so again, less waste. same with herbicides and pesticides.
With those systems, farmers are now seeing yields in the high 60s to low 80 bushels per acres on soybeans, 270-320 on corn. All while using less fertilizer, chemicals and seed counts than we did when me and my grandfather were farming 15-20 years ago and before. In the 90s, a bumper crop for beans mean 40 bushels an acre and 150 bushels an acre corn. And that was with GMOs. The exact same seed formulas are now producing twice that. We aren't using John Deere's system. We're using precision planting. Which does everything but control/drive the equipment, all that is still manual controlled. But Precision planting costs about 16,000 dollars compared to the John Deere equivalent which is about 38,000. Plus another 22,000 if you want auto steer, which is what both that combine and tractor in the video had. That's to retro fit it to older models. Then you still have the annual fee, precision planting is a flat 1200 dollar a year fee for the GPS, John Deere's varies but we were quoted 4,000 per lot.
Take soybeans at 40 bushells and acre. Say you have 50 acres of beans that's 2,000 bushels, at 10 bucks roughly per bushel, thats 20,000 dollars. Now bump that to what we averaged to day, which was 74 bushells, say 50 acres again, that's 3700 bushells, times 10 bucks a bushell, 37,000 dollars for a net difference of 17,000. We actually used LESS seed than we did 15 years ago too. Which saved about 2500-3000 in seed cost. So if they just use something like that, without the auto steer/autopilot stuff, you it can pay for itself really quick.
As for the system that was in the video. That combine costs 650,000 new, fully equipped with all that, not counting the 60-75,000 for the head. Then you have that 5,000 computer PER tractor you want to run it in, plus the 22,000 for autosteer, ontop of that 275,000-300,000 4WD tractor and the 60,000 dollar grain cart. So yeah, most hobby farmers aren't going to be using that.