by Josh Zuck

Yesterday we wrapped up our customer planter clinics and Sloan technician planter trainings. We had a very good turnout at all of them. We used the Precision Meter Max stand and did a side by side comparison of a brand new John Deere Pro Max 40 corn disk versus a brand new Precisions E-Set. They both ran identical with 0 skips and 0 multiples. This really opened customer’s eyes and shows that the Deere Pro Max 40 is an excellent option for our customers.

I have seen that for planters with the 1.6 bushel boxes or 3 bushel boxes, it is important to remove the row units and send to either Lanark or Assumption and have the double eliminators set and run the row units on the test stand. This step really helps our technicians that have to go out and start planters so can spend more time with the customer and his monitor, rather than trying to set the meters. Also, this way if the customer has his boxes full, we don’t have to remove corn to get the meter to move the eliminator.

We had a new 1770NT 16 row planter here in Lanark that kept blowing fuses. After looking it over we found the wiring harness going to the right agitator motor was pinched behind a bolt. Hopefully this will be the only one like this.

We have had a lot of interest in the new planters, both Max Emerge 5 and ExactEmerge. These two new planters should be a game-changer in 2015.

There has been a lot of customer interest in Deere’s new program to convert customer to SeedStar XP. Customer can get $2000 off this system. If you have any questions get a hold of your AMS specialist. Contact info is on sloans.com: http://www.sloans.com/ams/

After the Clinics, we have been getting calls from customers about doing planting prescriptions. They need some help from us on how to do them and we can work with their Agronomist on what to plant and what population. We are more than happy to help with this service.

Customers have been pricing JD Link to put in their older tractor or non Deere tractors to use Wireless Data Transfer and Remote Display Access.