KDD - 4/6/2024 13:23

I wish I had understood the real value of a complete technology system, vs trying to piece-meal an auto-steer system on the cheap.

Back in the early 2000's when auto-steer was first becoming available, I decided to try to "get by" on a cheaper-than-Deere guidance package.
It kinda worked for some operations, but the accuracy was not good at all, and the only thing it could do was steer. Period.

My son was in college at the time, and was familiar with the new stuff coming out from Deere. We have always had mostly green equipment, and he advised me to "bite the bullet" and invest in the much more useful but higher-priced Deere Greenstar system. I refused to spend $20-40,000 when I could "get by" with cheap $2-4000 steering wheel guidance.
We decided we wanted to try strip-till. Our "cheap" deal was just not accurate enough, so we bought another brand "cheap" rtk system.
By now, we had almost $20,000 wrapped up in two systems that would only steer, and not all that well.
I finally took my son's advice, sold (almost gave away) all the "cheap" stuff, and we bought complete Deere RTK systems and base station.
I did the math on what we thought we could save on seed and chems by going to a system that had not just steering, but section control as well.
It calculated out to be about an $8/acres projected savings, which would pay for the new system in 2-3 years for us.
Turns out, the actual saving is more like $15/acre/year, so the system almost paid for itself in one year.
If we had started out with the Deere system (or any brand that could be easily expanded beyond steering only), we would have had the full-blown system half paid for with what we threw away on trying to "get by' with a cheap, guidance-only deal.
Moral of the story: Don't be tempted to grab at the cheapest auto-steer you can get, without thinking through what benefits can actually come with a good system. Start with an expandable brand (Green, Red, whatever) that you can add functions to over time, and realize the actual, real $ benefits come not from steering, but from the section control and other functions, Steering is just the side benefit.