A bit of rant here:

So when is John Deere going to pull their heads out of you know where and get on the same page with how field boundaries work on all other software platforms and field devices.  In a perfect world, all fields are perfectly square and consist of one nicely drawn polygon on the outside.  Sadly, last time I checked, it isn't and so every farm ends up with some cut up fields that have multi-polygon field borders.

You may have noticed that with Apex, you can import a multi-polygon field border form another source and it show's up as it should on the screen.  However, when you perform a card save, Apex takes that nice field border, and creates a stupid land bridge between polygons so that the GS2/GS3 can display this field border in it's entirety.  While this is fine for the most part, why not take the resources wasted in creating this land bridge process in Apex and use that time and effort on the display firmware so that it can read and display multi-polygon field borders with out it.  It can do it for interior boundaries so I'm pretty sure that it would not be a stretch to make multiple exterior boundaries work.

If  you were to perform this same card save or device setup with Ag Leader SMS, the display will only show one of the polygons.  I'm not sure if all of the polygons are there and the display only chooses to use one or if the JD EIC dictates that only one polygon can be written for each field but that is the end result.  I'm not sure about Farmworks and other platforms but I'm pretty sure they are in the same boat.  To deal with this without having to use Apex you need to create a field border with this land bridge and use that as your default field border so that it gets used when you do a device setup.  You will then just need to grit your teeth every time you want to create an aesthetically pleasing map of your fields and have those ones with land bridges on there.

So why is all of this important.  Well, for mostly good reasons, John Deere displays use the field border for machine control of Rx applications and Swath Control Pro.  If you are outside the boundary, it won't apply product with Swath Pro, and will apply a default rate with Rx maps.  If you have a split field and only one polygon present, you would need to create a new border for the part of the field that has no border which also means that you would need to either create a new field or finish applying to part of the field before you start on the new section for everything to work properly.  Either way, it makes for more operator input which usually means that multiple field names get created which means more work at the computer later to clean this mess up.

As a service provider, I have several clients that hire me to manage their data and create their card setups.  So having to be constantly cleaning up their cards or spending time creating stupid land bridges only adds to their bills at the end of the year.   As you can guess, I'm not fan of Apex and only use as a last resort.  It doesn't need to be this way John Deere, how about you demonstrate that you are the leader you profess to be and get caught up to the industry norm?

I'm done now......and feel much better.