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| I started a long reply explaining why I thought RTK was necessary for us. I realized that it wasn't all that relevant to this conversation. The long and the short of it is that from what I can tell, I believe there is a significant amount of money that can be saved with row shutoffs hydraulically as opposed to Tru-Count clutches. I also like the idea of not having to do any maintenance on the clutches and not having to worry about whether they're slipping or anything like that. I am happy with the Insight and Seed Command so we'll probably stick with it.
Just for reference, like you say, our guidance and row control setup was much more expensive than what you did and probably not significantly more effective:
MojoRTK Console with base station: $10,000
EZ-Steer Motor: $ 3,500
Tru-Count clutch kit: $ 6,494
Insight and Direct Command: $ 6,600
Total: $26,594
I can't imagine a much cheaper way to do it if you feel that RTK is necessary for you (unless the EZ-500 can take NMEA for position input rather than it's own antenna). However, I appreciate that your combination does almost the same thing for significantly less money:
EZ-Guide 500: $3000
EZ-Steer: $3500
EZ-Boom: $1895
Hydraulics: $2500?
Total: $10,895?
One remaining question I have for you is do you drill a significant amount of wheat with your EZ-Guide 500/EZ-Steer? If so, do you set an overlap in with it? We simply must keep the MojoRTK setup until we switch to a 24 row planter, but our original decision to purchase it had nothing to do with that situation; it has developed since we purchased it. Anyways, I was wondering because one of the primary reasons that we purchased it was because when we drilled wheat with no overlap set with the EZ-Guide+, we found skips in the field from time to time. To ensure that this didn't happen in subsequent years, we always ran with an overlap. After calculating it out, it really doesn't take long to pay for the RTK setup if you can get away with not setting any overlap in. Of course, maybe you drill round and round which would make this point moot because you'd probably be using markers or something other than guidance at that point. | |
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Hydraulic Drives to control Planter sections
