You may recall that last year I bought a new John Deere combine, which was pretty exciting for me. Just this past February I bought a new planter. Of course, it was another John Deere (it’s a family history thing if you recall). The combine helps in the fall with the harvest and the planter helps in the spring with, well, the planting.

The planter is a machine with vertical steel disks that create straight rows, drops the seed into the row in a pre-determined spacing pattern, sprays it with fertilizer, covers the seed with dirt, and then smooths the dirt with some chains that drag behind.

My new planter has 24 rows of disks so it can plant about 30,000 seeds to an acre and it is almost entirely automated. While I have to “ride along” the steering is controlled by a satellite that feeds to the on-board computer. It monitors how many seeds are planted and how much fertilizer is used. Just like every other industry, it’s all about portion control!!

Technology is great and makes producing food for the world more efficient and economical.

Later, Dave

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Bloomsbury Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.