Big news this week in the world of precision agriculture. Ag Leader Technology not only launched new products, it announced a new alliance with AutoFarm.
This new collaboration brings together popular and successful precision farming products from Ag Leader with the latest embedded and integrated steering solutions from AutoFarm.
Yesterday, I caught up with company founder and President Al Myers to learn more about this partnership, and the continued innovation of products coming from Ag Leader…and from the combined collaboration strength with AutoFarm.
“Ag Leader has built its success over the years by being very innovative with leading-edge products that continue to make growers more efficient, productive and profitable,” Myers says. “By joining forces with AutoFarm, we see this as a win-win for the industry, and more importantly for our combined customers. Each company brings specific strengths, which will allow us to develop better product solutions quicker, to benefit the farmer.”
Herb Satterlee, CEO, Novariant-AutoFarm is also excited about this collaboration. “Ag Leader has a great reputation for innovative, high-quality precision agriculture hardware and software. We are known for our high-accuracy steering systems. Between our two companies, we plan to leverage our strengths and experience to offer the world’s most advanced and complete precision farming solutions to our dealers and customers.”
Here is a quick glimpse into the new products. More to come next week.
New Products.
1. New INTEGRA Display – This 12-inch, high-definition color touch-screen display is Ag Leader’s most complete, fourth generation system that combines year-around guidance, steering and operation controls. It’s touted as the ideal investment because it can handle the most basic manual lightbar tasks, to the most sophisticated variable-rate control tasks.
2. ParaDyme Advanced Automated Steering – This full-featured steering system, developed by AutoFarm, uses a dual-antenna roof module to track roll, pitch and yaw to deliver repeatable sub-inch accuracy. ParaDyme supports WAAS, OmniSTAR HP/XP and RTK differential correction signals for over 350 vehicle platforms.
3. OptRx Crop Sensor – Working with Holland Scientific, Ag Leader launches their on-to-go optical nitrogen sensor that works with their display to map and apply variable amounts to avoid excessive rates.
In addition to the recently released INTEGRA display and ParaDyme steering system, the two companies plan to collaborate on future projects.
“We’re definitely excited about the possibilities of future projects with the strength this cooperation brings,” Myers says.
Satterlee concurs, “This is the beginning of a new era in precision agriculture that will bring our end user customers more ways to reduce input costs, increase efficiency, improve their decision making and increase farm profitability.”
Stay tuned for more new product details next week.
2 Comments on “Ag Leader Aligns With AutoFarm and Launches New Products”
Autofarm is making a huge mistake by partnering with Ag Leader. Out here in California’s central valley there isn’t a whole lot of variable rate anything going on, although there is a little, and most people just want to steer straight. So now, we are forced to buy a smaller, less responsive user terminal that Autofarm has let get way out of hand. Ag Leader now decides how the operating screens will appear in order to suit their needs in a user terminal, leaving Autofarm with a behind the scenes settings menu. There is going to be a lot of unused functionality in this new setup and it’s not worth it to purchase. What was wrong with the A5? It was simple and easy to teach people how to use, even when language barriers are an issue. I understand that it’s necessary to advance technology however; Autofarm / Ag leader are severely over-complicating tractor guidance. What it all boils down to is for customers that only want steering, Autofarm isn’t offering a simply, easy to use, competitively priced system.
Autofarm is making a huge mistake by partnering with Ag Leader. Out here in California’s central valley there isn’t a whole lot of variable rate anything going on, although there is a little, and most people just want to steer straight. So now, we are forced to buy a smaller, less responsive user terminal that Autofarm has let get way out of hand. Ag Leader now decides how the operating screens will appear in order to suit their needs in a user terminal, leaving Autofarm with a behind the scenes settings menu. There is going to be a lot of unused functionality in this new setup and it’s not worth it to purchase. What was wrong with the A5? It was simple and easy to teach people how to use, even when language barriers are an issue. I understand that it’s necessary to advance technology however; Autofarm / Ag leader are severely over-complicating tractor guidance. What it all boils down to is for customers that only want steering, Autofarm isn’t offering a simply, easy to use, competitively priced system.