Simplicity drives Bark River Valley Farms near Fort Atkinson, Wis. Father-son team Bruce and Matt Ehlers closely weigh the benefits of adopting technology with its cost, and they have found a way to simply and economically leverage precision farming equipment in their operation.

At Stardell Farms near Fredericksburg, Iowa, the Kleiss family has been able to extract some interesting results from the data produced with their precision farming technology.

Frank Moore is a crop consultant and strip-tiller, who farms with his nephew, father and brother-in-law near Cresco, Iowa. As long time conservation-minded operators who grow almost 2,000 acres of corn and soybeans, they rely on precision farming equipment to plant, fertilize, spray and harvest their crops while minimizing soil and nutrient loss.

Paul and Mike Schweitzer have been changing up tillage and fertilizer practices to reduce input costs, improve soil and water quality and maintain or increase yields over conventional tillage on their 1,200 acre, fourth-generation farm near Malta, Ill.

Ryan Groholske admits it. He’s a hoarder. But he’s not a candidate for a TLC Hoarding: Buried Alive episode. He hoards data from his precision farming system and mines it to help him manage his strip-tillage system and justify better crop insurance coverage for less cost.

Mixing red, green and blue equipment in a precision farming system can create a rainbow of headaches, but Jamie Shenk, operations manager at Beauregard Farms, thinks he has found a good pain reliever: an independent precision farming supplier.

Glenn Dye has an interesting perspective on precision farming equipment. Before he began farming full-time two years ago, he sold and serviced precision farming equipment for  Greenline Service Corp., a John Deere dealership in Fredericksburg, Va.

Editor’s Note: While we usually talk to a production farmer for this feature in PFD, for this issue we spoke with a researcher who is developing equipment that works in concert with specific hybrid seeds, utilizing test plots as his laboratory.

Don and Brian Glenn squeeze five crops out of three years on the 1,500 acres they no-till on Glenn Acres near Hillsboro in northern Alabama.

“Precision farming is less about growing more crops and more about saving inputs on areas that don’t need them or won’t increase your profitability,” says Canadian farmer Jim Wickett.