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NE Iowa | Your whole operation sounds very familiar to mine. I'm just about 11 years older and on the other side of the Mississippi River from you. I have a 6 row planter, hire my combining done, have hilly ground, and farm a lot of 100' wide contour strips. Here's my 2 cents:
#1) Keep hiring the combining done. The maintenance time and $$$ and shed space it takes to own a combine for a few hundred acres is not worth it. I tried owning an old cheap combine once for about 5 years. One of my best days farming was the day it left. In my hills I hire guys with sidehill combines and they lose way more out the back then if I did it myself with an old level land combine.
#2) Get a half-width disconnect on your planter so you can shut it off 3 rows at a time. Just a simple electric clutch type. Run it manually with a toggle switch. Hard to make individual row clutches pay on only a few hundred acres.
#3) A 3pt. sprayer is nice in the hills. I'd spend money on a wider then 30' boom but just stick with manually switch to turn on and off sections.
#4) For your acres skip the wet bin and drier and go with natural air dry bins. When you hire the combining done it is hard to justify a drier that can keep up with the combine. If you size your fans correctly you can fill bins with 18-20% corn in one day. Run the fans for about a month and you are done. I dry corn in about 7 different small bins every year with no heat in any of them. I usually fill them all in about 3 days time. Custom guy comes once and we do it all.
If you want any help sizing fans for air drying corn let me know.
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What will be the greater return on investment? Dryer or precisionAg
