Here is a picture of the tractor pulling the planter. Note on the top of the cab there is a green circle thing. That is a GPS unit that is hooked to the tractor and receives a signal from a nearby spot. This tractor is set up for auto-steering which means it mostly drives itself. You do have to turn corners for it, however.
Since it drives itself I had to take a picture of Ben "driving" the tractor...notice no hands on the wheel?
You can see 2 computer monitors in the above picture. The gray one on the left is the monitor for the GPS system. It tells the driver where they are in the field, where they have already planted, and how many rows they have left to plant (as well as a bunch of other stuff, too). In the upper right corner you can see a green screen. This is a seed planting monitor. It monitors each of the planter units (there are 10) and reports problems. It tells the quality of the planting job and how many dollars you are losing per acre (if something isn't going right). This one also does a lot more, I'm sure, but you get the idea. Now days instead of driving the tractor you keep your eyes busy watching the screens and making sure everything is doing what it should.
Here is a picture of Nicholas happily riding along in the tractor. Sorry his head is cut off, it can be a bit bumpy in there!
Here are Ben and Nicholas driving tractor...again no hands on the wheel.
Time to check those monitors. This one you can actually see the screen a bit. The blue is what they already planted. The white line down the middle is where we were driving (see the dot in the middle of the screen? That's us!). They gray on the right is what we still needed to plant.
So, there is your farming lesson for the day. Hope you enjoyed a look into planting with us!
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