Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | Through the years with various Ag Leader displays and acquisition of more land our field name scheme got rather messy. What seemed so obvious at first has now become a bit confused.
Actually this might be a good time for me to "start over" with new names to go forward. I farm with my nephew and his sons. In most respects concerning the field names we consider this as one large organization. Depending on how I organize the Farms/Fields, there might be around 20 fields.
I think if/when I start over with a revised naming system I will use the Farm and subsequent field names within each of those farms more than I have. My plan would be to literally hand type my new Farm/Field names into one of my InCommand displays. I have a Lab of sorts in my basement with 12VDC power etc. so I could bring in my displays and work through the process in the house.
With our current holdings some pieces of land are physically separate from each other. In other cases some pieces of land border each other and it would be possible to operate them at times as one continuous larger field. We have done that but have gone away from that idea since the length of these larger fields resulted in more travel for the grain cart. For our equipment having row lengths of around 160 rods works out nicely. For the most part our fields are rectangles.
So I plan on naming each "chunk" of land as a separate Farm with a unique name which is often the name of the former owner. Within each farm there might be one or more fields. One field might be named All, another East, another West etc..
For example, one farm might be named Stenzel after the former owner. Within it I might have fields named Stenzel All, Stenzel West and Stenzel East. If the entire farm was going to be planted to the same crop the operator would chose the Stenzel Farm and then the Stenzel All field. If the farm was going to be split into two crops, the operator would chose Stenzel Farm and then Stenzel East or Stenzel West. This would be a way to have "enough" names to cover each situation.
I realize a field can be split between tow different crops thus making the All, East, West idea unnecessary. It just seems better to me to have each crop be in a separate field within that Farm for each year.
Although I have three InCommand 1200s due to trade up programs, I have one I consider my Master. It and my GPS 7500 unlocked and subscribed for Terra Star Pro C get moved between the planting tractor, the Hagie Sprayer and the Combine. The other InCommands are mostly involved with steering and some manure application. I would hand enter the new Farm/Field scheme into the Master InCommand.
Ag Leader has/had a process where existing Farm/Field names could be transferred to another display from an existing display. I really never explored the idea all that much. I think I should at this point.
As I recall the displays have to be relatively new to use the process. I don't know if they all need to be the same model although mine are all InCommand 1200s. The process allows field names from one display to be added to the existing field names (if any) in the receiving display. The process involved using a USB stick to complete the process. This likely can be done other ways as well.
A simple example would be where an operator added a new display to his operation. He could clone the field names from an existing display and have them transfer to the new display that had no Farm/Field names.
If the receiving display already had some Farm/Field names in it, then the Farm/Fields that were different were added to what was already in the receiving display. If the receiving display already had a particular Farm/Field in it that was the same as the first display it was not duplicated. The idea was that the Farm/Field list could increase but none were ever deleted.
If the receiving display had some Farm/Field names in it that were not already in the first display then I suppose the process could be repeated the other way round. Then the end result would be that both displays would have all the Farm/Field names that had been on either display.
Thanks for the post, it reminded me that I was planning on revising our Farm/Field arrangement.
Edited by tedbear 2/5/2026 09:04
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Naming fields architecture for future SMS use
