No offense on the drummer soils! It is a joke, obviously an exageration. However, many folks in N IL just don't appreciate their soils andcanditions and what it takes to raise a corn crop in many other places.

What I meant regarding monitors is the new JD monitor has a visual reading of row unit gage wheel down pressure.  They do use air to change row unit down pressure on the JD system. However you can replace the JD airbags with our Rfx hydraulic system and manually change the Rfx dial in response to what you see on the JD monitor screen. For folks such as you that do not have highly variable conditions across the field that will work.

Just for comparison here is a 3 minute video from a SD tractor cab from a few years ago of the wet spots they have to farm around. Try taking an 80 or 90 ft planter around these and see how close you can get. This is strip tilling with our Pluribus units mounted on a used Kinze 60 ft 3700 planter toolbar. This is what these folks need to deal with about every year. And please don't tell them to tile it!

NE KS terraces is another area which can raise good corn but would drive many Illinois farmers to drink. And rocks in ND, peat and sand strips in MN....

Jim at Dawn

added later: "My soils don't vary that much" also reminds me of the first time I rode in a combine with one of our yield monitors across a flat, uniform-appearing (from the road) WC IL bean field. This field was a typical IL bean field about 45-50 bu (this is 20 years ago) avg. But watching that first yield monitor was an eye-opener! In places the yield hit 75 or 80 bu and in places it was 20 bu...the obvious question is "why?". And I think it basically comes down to soil type changes in the field. Heavy soil  in some spots and lighter soils in others.

It may be startling to see what you can do if you can sense various changes in soil density/hardness and react to it as you cross a field.  We also can see where maybe you use hardness as an indicator of soil type and change your population as you approach a hard or soft er spot.... and it may pay to do so.  The future is in more precise planting, even in fields that don't look like they vary that much.  Maybe they vary more than we think. 

Sorry to carry on but as you can tell we are excited about this new technology and what it can lead to.