New technology in tractors helps make farming more efficient

In this week’s Home Grown segment, News 11 looks at some of the new technologies being used in tractors.

Nate Dorsey is an Agronomist with RDO Equipment in Yuma. He’s basically an agriculture scientist but, he specializes in precision agriculture and the technologies used within modern tractors.

For the past ten years, John Deere has been a head of the self-driving car era through their own autonomous technology.

Besides being able to drive themselves, tractors now-a-days have internet capability, which allows them to send data directly to the farmer.

“They can see all of their data almost in real-time,” Dorsey said. “They can see where the machine is located and how much fuel they’ve used, how hard their machines are working and how much cotton they’re pulling out of the field,” he added.

It seems like there’s almost nothing these new tractors can’t do. They have even evolved in size.

Dorsey showed News 11 John Deere’s largest tractor, the 9620 RX. It has a 620 horsepower engine and costs nearly $600,000.

“The landscape of agriculture has changed,” Dorsey said. “There are less people farming but they’re farming more acres so because of that you have to have bigger machines that can hold bigger pieces of equipment and can cover more ground,” he said.

The future of these monster-truck sized farm machines looks like they will continue to get smarter and smarter.

“One exciting thing is this past fall, John Deere acquired Blue River technology and Blue River is a company that has actually been doing business here in Yuma, partnering with some growers on some of their autonomous and semi-autonomous spray rigs,” he said.

This new technology helps with many things like target spraying weeds instead of spraying a blanket of product over the whole field. Nate also mentioned how complicated farming itself has gotten over the years.

“Most people don’t realize how complicated it is, so a lot of our farmers are making very very complicated decisions for their farm and their business and they are using data to do that and make sure in the smartest way possible that they are profitable and helping to feed everyone,” he said.