Equipment add | Shandong Forgingss Group

FARGO — David Gorder said keeping up with farm technology doesn't always mean having to buy new equipment.

For the farm he helps operate near Grand Forks, it makes sense to add on to equipment already in the shed and use software to make good business decisions.

"We did a lot of retrofitting of equipment," Gorder said Thursday, June 8, during a panel discussion at Cultivate, an agriculture technology conference, hosted by Grand Farm in Fargo.

"We retrofitted with precision planting to get more accurate with our seed depth, and also we have Section Control, individual downforce for each row, just you can get that seed exactly where you want to put it," he said.

Section Control is a feature from John Deere that reduces overlaps and skips in planting and spraying.

"What Section Control does is on a planter — if you're going over a place that you already planted, it automatically tells those sections to shut off so you're not overseeding two spots; it saves on a seed cost," Gorder said, adding that it helps with spraying, too. "You avoid damage to your crop from overexposure to chemical and also avoid skips so you don't have a weed escape to take away your yield in the field."

Gorder said their upgrades have been all about speed.

"In the Red River Valley, in North Dakota in general, I would say our planting windows are so short, it's like, as soon as it's time to go, you want to make sure you can get the crop in as fast as possible," he said.

Gorder said when he graduated from the University of North Dakota in 2013, his father-in-law asked if he would help with planting the next day. He has been a part of the farming operation since then. He also has a land brokerage and equipment auction company.

"Right before I got there, we adopted some data management technology, which looking back has driven a lot of our decisions since then," he said. "So, that was a really big hurdle for us, or a tool for us to get, because we could accurately track everything we've done for each field from year to year, to help make decisions on where you felt you were strong and where you felt we needed some attention."

While being a fairly early adopter of new technology, Kyle Courtney, of Oakes, admitted there are drawbacks.

"I love it when a $3 sensor makes my planter stop for six hours," he said to laughter from the crowd.

He said his favorite tractor on the farm dates back to 1980.

"Because if anything goes wrong, then I can fix it, and I could have it back up and running," Courtney said. "The technology on these new pieces of equipment, you have to hire a tech to come out, hope you can get them in a timely fashion, and they're charging $175 an hour to hook it up to a computer and flip the switch."

Grand Farm , an experimental project to develop technology with a farm near Casselton, North Dakota, to test autonomous equipment, is trying to identify those kinds of pain points in the industry to help overcome them.

In an earlier panel, Matt Erickson of Farm Credit Services described technology advancements as helping farmers follow the markets, analyze their margins and not necessarily cutting costs, but "optimizing costs."

"So let's say, for fertilizer, we don't put any additional fertilizer that we don't need, and a lot of that is because of technology and the use of optimization," he said.