Mike Bland has been around the block a few times with precision farming equipment. More than a decade ago, he and his father, who is now mostly retired, started with a John Deere Brown Box for guidance, then upgraded to a GreenStar 2 controller and they now run with a GS3 unit.

On Steve Duwe’s 1,120 acre farm near Johnson Creek, Wis., making the most of his strip-till corn and no-till soybeans operation on moderately sloping ground, requires more than a steady hand.

By Brian Hoffman’s estimation, he’s had better than average luck adopting precision farming tools at Hoffman & Sons Inc., where he farms with his brother-in-law, Jesse Scroeder, and long time employee, Dan Bolling, near Brunswick in northeastern Nebraska. They no-till 2,200 acres of corn, soybeans, alfalfa and dryland cereal rye.

An early adopter of precision farming practices, Roger Wenning remembers using his Massey Ferguson combine in the 1980s to weigh grain as it offloaded and then tracked yield patterns with an early monitor.

Gary Kregel and his family have more than enough to do on their 2,100 acre dairy operation near Guttenberg, Iowa. Located near the Mississippi River, their fields are highly irregular in shape and range from highly erodible land to river bottoms.

When purchasing precision farming equipment, Minnesota no-tiller Myron Sylling prefers to have dealers give him as much detail as possible.

Scott Mavis is no stranger to precision farming equipment and at times, the challenges it can create. He and his father, Gary, grow primarily corn and soybeans near Edgerton, Ohio, no-tilling all soybeans and no-tilling about half their corn, depending on the crop rotation.

Keith Schlapkohl’s corn-growing philosophy turns it up a notch.

Darrington Seward, managing partner at Seward & Son Planting Co. and Seward & Harris Planting Co., knows all too well the importance of staying on top of work in progress on the 22,000 acres they farm in a 4-county radius near Louise, Miss.

Idaho farmer Robert Blair’s precision farming journey began with a personal digital assistant (PDA) and an antenna that he fastened to his cap in 2003.