It never ceases to amaze me when I talk to farmers at how many get done planting, turn off their monitor, and never even bother to download the data out of it. I think at this point I have heard every excuse in the book – “I don’t need the data”, “it doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know”, “I didn’t even know it would do that”, and my personal favorite “I don’t trust computers”
All that being said, there is a wealth of information available to you from the monitor in your planter tractor. Information such as where each of the hybrids are planted can be useful to you or your agronomist while evaluating the crop during the growing season.
The planting dates would be my next favorite piece of information. These are helpful to certify acres with the FSA office, but there is also several other uses for this information. In my operation, I have been able to determine where all the corn was planted on a certain day, once I noticed an emergence issue with one of the fields related to weather patterns and planting date. Planting date along with hybrid is also helpful during harvest, to identify which field should dry down first.
Population data, if logged by your monitor, stands out with some value. This can be compared to what the actual stand is to help with evaluating different hybrids.
This information can also be compared with yield data later in the year, and we can look at yield by hybrid, yield by population, and yield by hybrid by soil type.
Another favorite of mine is planting speed. There are several opinions out there about the optimum planting speed – by planter type, by meter type, by ground conditions, etc. The truth is that the best data available is in your own monitor. This data is from your ground conditions, your planter, with your meters. Yield by planting speed can be calculated if we have data from both operations.
All of this information can be gleamed from your monitor in your planter tractor, and if it seems overwhelming to process the data, maybe it’s not your thing to sit behind the computer but you would still like the information, we can help. HTS offers packages to turn all this data into information, that will assist you in making profitable management decisions about your operation.