We’ve already heard about a couple of the more leading-edge technologies our friends at John Deere displayed at this year’s AG CONNECT, including their JDLink technology. Another product that caught attendees’ attentions was Field Connect, John Deere’s soil moisture monitoring tool.
“It’s pulling soil moisture information from your field, very specific to that location, and providing that to you to make decisions about how you want to manage that field moisture,” explained Nick Shafer, John Deere’s product manager for the company’s ISG group, focusing on Field Connect. The technology consists of three components with a sensing probe that gathers the information every 30 minutes, a gateway that collects and evaluates the information every two hours and a website where producers can collect the evaluated information. And since it operates on either a cell or satellite modem, there’s no worry about not getting a signal no matter where you are.
Nick said there’s also no worries about the security of the information, a hot topic at AG CONNECT. “We want to be transparent. The control of that data will be with the customer.”
You can listen to Chuck’s interview with Nick here: [wpaudio url=”http://zimmcomm.biz/agconnect/agconnect-13-john-deere-shafer.mp3″ text=”Interview with Nick Shafer”]