We are about to find out how well the original Greenstar does VR. Just bought the Map Based Seeding key card for our 1790. The good news the price has come down considerably. I coughed at the cost of the card last year and refused to buy it so did not VR last year (VR corn seed is questionable profitability and marginal at best - I never could pencil in paying a lot for the agility to do it - sure wasn't going to pay an arm and a leg for the key card). This year they dropped the price and I got one.

I think a number of people have used the GS1 to VR with and it works ok. The flaky part is JD does not make it the easiest thing to get the prescriptions from a program like Map Calc imported. That is what Becky will be working on in the near future. I wish our planter did not have Seedstar (bought it a month before planting so had to take what was built) because we already have all the prescriptions set up ready to go for Ag Leader - oh well will keep life interesting. Now we will have to keep two prescription files - Ag Leader for the one planter - and Greenstar for the other. I wish these companies would get something standard instead of each living in their own world.

If you are doing a few fields looking at several years of maps and arbitrarily drawing some lines in for the VR map is ok - it is a way to get started. Start doing a dignificant number of fields and it very clearly becomes an overwhelming task - thus the need for an analitical program that can do some number crunching pretty easily and do the jobs in batches (map calc could improve on the batch process part). This tales a lot of the human subjectiveness out. I don't think JD has ever thought that far down the road to the point that someone might actually try to use some of this stuff more than as a casual novelty.

Doing the VR is easy as far as the equipment goes - has been for a number of years. The tools and knowlege to figure out what and how much to vary is the trick and has been all along. The hardware is ahead of the software as usual.

John