With auto steering and RTK guidance correction, Mississippi farmer Chip Davis can plant and harvest 24/7 when he needs to, according to a recent story in Delta Farm Press.

For farmers, says Chip Davis, “There are toys and there are tools. We all have our toys — but for something to be a tool, you have to make more from it than you pay for it. For me, a guidance system is a tool that not only helps to be more efficient, it also gives an excellent return on the investment.”

Davis has one Trimble stand-alone system that he shares between a tractor and a combine, and another Trimble/Mid-Tech system that is devoted to a single tractor and is capable of both guidance and variable rate application. The shared system only takes about 10 minutes to swap from the combine to the tractor.

Although the manufacturers don’t guarantee or promote it, he says, studies have shown RTK systems can be accurate to one-half centimeter, about a fourth the width of a penny.

“We’re big on no-till, and with that kind of precision, we can put a seed right back in the same trench as the previous year, and we can do it row after row.

“We can do straight A-B guidance, or we can set up irregular patterns, or pivot circles. Pretty much whatever you need, you can do.”

He has the systems configured for various fields and crops and for various operations — fertilizing, planting, chemical applications, etc.

For more details, read the story.