Harvest is running rampant in northern Illinois. With such a mild fall, and not many doses of rain, northern Illinois farmer Dan Hartmann says the rhythm of harvest hasn’t seen many delays this year.
“Things are drier than I expected by quite a bit,” says Hartmann who farms in Maple Park, Ill. “The corn is yielding surprisingly well for being as dry of a year that we’ve had. We got in early, and corn yields are above average. So, I’m very, very impressed.”
Hartmann says corn yields are the star on his farm. Soybean yields aren’t as good but are still hovering right around average for yields this year.
“I think everything kind of ran out of water in August and early September,” Hartmann says.
Hartmann Family Farm: A Legacy of Innovation
Hartmann’s family farm spans across 5,500 acres of row crops, and they also raise close to 7,000 head of hogs. Four generations have farmed here, and as the next generation on the farm, it’s Dan who’s always looking for what’s next.
“We got into a self-propelled sprayer as of four years ago,” Hartmann says. “We were looking to upgrade our sprayer, because we saw the benefit in having a big self-propelled sprayer. And to put it in perspective, we went from a 60' pull-behind sprayer to a 120' self-propelled sprayer, so it was a it was quite the leap that we made.”
It was a major upgrade the Hartmanns decided to dive into, and that decision opened the door for what was possible.
“After doing that, we realized we could get more precise,” Hartmann says. “We could do a couple extra applications.”
Knowing upgrading to a brand new sprayer was out of their price range for this year, they opted for a 2018 model that had ExactApply nozzles.
“See & Spray was a pretty big selling point on it. That’s something we could add to it,” Hartmann says. “I wasn’t sure how to use it on our own farm because I didn’t know how much our weed pressure we actually had since we’ve always just broadcasted things. What impressed me was it didn’t matter what I did, the See & Spray worked just like it’s supposed to. I mean, it saw the weeds, and it sprayed it.”
Significant Herbicide Savings Across Fields
Hartmann was impressed as he watched it work across the field, but he says what ultimately confirmed they made the right decision was the amount of savings they saw when it came to herbicide applications.
“I actually ran the numbers already, and if I only used it on bean acres, the technology would pay for itself in a year and a half,” Hartmann says. “That’s based off data that we collected this year. That alone speaks volumes of what it’s worth, and so that was really impressive.”
Calculating the impact, Hartmann was able to nail down his savings field by field, and calculate it down to the dollars per acre. Hartmann says in one field alone, the savings was several thousand dollars.
“We had a field of beans pretty far south over here, and I ran two residual passes, and then I came back a third time with just the See & Spray. We were spraying Liberty, and so the Liberty cost per acre is pretty high, but that field alone saved us over $8,000 in chemicals because I only sprayed 18% of the field, and it was a 200-acre field.”
The biggest battle with weeds in his area of Illinois is waterhemp. It’s a yearly battle that can be difficult to stay ahead.
“From the cab, you’re driving down the road, you can’t see all the weeds even though it’s spraying them,” Hartmann says. “And that’s a game I would play as I was driving across the field, I would see a weed from the cab that wasn’t very big, and I’d watch it go by the boom. Sure enough, it sprayed it, but it’s also spraying all these weeds I wasn’t seeing. We had really good coverage, so that was impressive.”
Future Investments in Precision Farming
With commodity prices hovering where they’re at today, every dollar counts on Hartmann’s farm, and that means he’s still willing to invest in technology, but he wants to be smart about those investments.
“We’re getting to the point where we’re scraping to save every dollar per acre or grow more bushels to counter or offset the price of it,” Hartmann says. “Our margins are getting tighter, so we have to find a way to make better use of our equipment.”
As he watched the machine work this year, Hartmann saw how much more precise he could be with a new way to fight those stubborn and tough-to control weeds. And as harvest revealed the final results with what weeds survived and what didn’t, Hartmann is excited about what the cameras and machine learning can actually do.
“I haven’t really thought about what’s next,” Hartmann says. “I mean, this sprayer was a pretty big leap for us, so it’s encouraging to see it pan out. It makes us excited for the future. It’s like, what else can we do?”
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