Northeast Iowa farmer Tim Burrack is getting a little taste of Murphy’s Law this spring, and he’s not too thrilled about it. The same goes for Kansas farmer Matt Splitter. Both men are dealing with farm equipment that is breaking down more often than it is getting the job done.
It’s easy to see why such a situation would be so frustrating from the farmer point-of-view: the ag technology they’ve invested in to keep things on track this spring has basically done the complete opposite. And when the ideal planting windows are as compressed and as brief as they are today, stalled equipment is more than just a little problematic.
“There’s been a lot of problems for me — that’s a reason I’m not done planting yet — there’s just all these issues slowing us down, and more often than not, it’s (a problem with) the technology,” Burrack told “AgriTalk” host Chip Flory this week during his appearance on the weekly Farmer Forum segment.
Just yesterday, Burrack says, one row on his planter completely shut down. He took it down to the local dealership, but even the dealer technician was stumped. Lucky for Brook, the dealer’s IT guy was in the office that day and he figured out how to get his planter back up and running.
“He said let’s do an ISOBUS shutdown. Now, I’d never even heard that term before, but it’s when you shut everything off, you unplug the planter from the tractor, and then you start the tractor, back it up, and then plug the planter back in while the tractor is running,” he says. “That ended up solving my problem, but then something else shut down, and we sat there for another hour and a half before we figured that out. Stuff like that — as a farmer it makes you want to pull your hair right out.”
Kansas farmer Matt Splitter considers himself an early tech adopter, but even he is feeling a bit of tech-fatigue after having to do more “hard resets than I can count on all my extremities” this spring.
“There’s just something coming at us every day, all the time,” he says. “You get error codes. You get warnings. We’ve got a tractor down right now because of (an issue with) wiring, and we’ve got planters shut down. We can’t go a full day without some kind of technology issue, and what’s crazy is it’s not something that completely stops you in your tracks, just something that makes you want to pull your hair out. And there’s nothing you can really do other than chase down a mile of wires or do a hard reset.”
Splitter puts the onus for the dodgy tech and machinery squarely on farm equipment and ag tech providers. He believes they are not perfecting new products and machines before releasing them for sale, and then they simply move on to the next new product in the pipeline.
“And the technicians at the dealerships are not being properly trained, either,” he adds. “They’re at a loss for how to fix a lot of these problems, as well.”
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