by Bill Kletecka, Cuba City, WI

Cuba City’s planting has progressed at a fevered pace this past week with fair soil conditions. Some fields are still a little wet, however customers are running anyhow. One idea to keep in mind before starting any equipment is to try running it in the barnyard before you head to the field for the first time. We stress this every year at the clinics however we still find ourselves waiting while customers are cleaning out fertilizer lines that weren’t properly winterized, or haven’t hooked everything up yet.

We have had a few customers run into a couple of problems this past week. Several customers complained that they were unable to autosteer with their iTC receiver. Somehow two of the three customers had incorrect frequencies in the displays, the third customer was running into lack of satellites with a storm front coming in. Remember that in order to have autosteer working that you need to have some sort of 3D signal.

Another problem that we noticed was that two customers had planted some in a field and switched out of the field that they were in for one reason or another, and then switched back. When they started planting again the section control wasn’t responding to the previous coverage. One of these two case is definitely not due to satellite drift. John Deere has acknowledged a problem with this happening and are working on a cause to this. They have asked us for help in determining the root cause. If you have this happen the want us to get as much information about it as possible. The only fix that I have found is to put another round of headlands on the field and then the section control will function properly over the new headlands, but still not over the original ones.