Maximizing ROI with Planter Upgrades: Insights from Commodity Classic 2025

00:00 Well, it's no secret the farm economy's got some struggles right now, but you're looking for options 00:00:04 that you can deploy financially that will pay for themselves pretty quickly almost immediately. I'm the John Deere booth at Commodity Classic 2025 00:00:13 with Clint Chaffer, with John Deere, and my friend Kelly Garrett with Extreme Mag. We're talking about planter upgrades that have a ROI 00:00:20 that you can absolutely get behind because it pays for itself really fast. Let's talk about exact shot. I got an old planter. 00:00:26 I want to be at the front of my game. I can't go out and buy a new planter, but I can apply exact shot to my planter. 00:00:31 Pretty quick payback on that. Absolutely. I mean, uh, so Exact shot is basically utilizing, uh, you know, a dosing technology. 00:00:39 So we're tracking the seed through the brush belt, and when that seed kicks out, you're basically utilizing this little sprayer tip down 00:00:46 here, and it's putting a dose right on the seed. And when you end up doing that, you're having a two third savings on 00:00:51 your fertilizer. Alright. You ran a 12-year-old planter and you said, but it's not a 12-year-old planter. 00:00:57 So I've changed this and this and this. What we're talking about is a machine's a machine, but some of this technology you can, yeah, 00:01:03 I'll spend a little bit, and I'll put this on here. It's an upgrade and it paid for itself if you, you finally got rid of it. 00:01:08 Absolutely. They're talking two thirds savings. It wouldn't be hard at all to have $30 Inferral. Now all of a sudden it's 10 bucks. 00:01:14 I'm gonna have 6,000 acres of corn save $20 easy math. That's $120,000 savings. That's an ROI year one, the upgrade does not cost $120,000. 00:01:23 Yeah. And I don't know if you wanna get into numbers, but seriously, for the person that's listening that says, okay, I don't have 6,000 acres of corn, 00:01:28 but I do have whatever, uh, is, is, is 20 bucks an acre savings or, or is it the payback? Is that a real number? 00:01:35 Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. We've, we've talked to a lot of different, uh, farmers that have had incredible savings. 00:01:40 I talked to, uh, one guy in Iowa that he had, uh, I think he was, uh, after all everything taken out, right? I think he had a savings of like 15 to 00:01:49 to $17 an acre on that. It really all depends on what you're putting in the tank. And I think, Kelly, I think you're, you know, you 00:01:54 and I were talking that you can start really adding a lot of different things to this 00:01:59 because you're having the savings on this. You're The product expert. When a person comes to you, they say, Hey man, 00:02:05 I I'm a mid-size farmer. I I just can't justify my money to go out and buy brand new stuff. 00:02:11 What should I do? You start 'em off with, this is the first thing you start 'em off with on a planter upgrade. 00:02:14 Yeah. It probably all depends on where their planter's at. Right? So we may talk about like meter upgrade kits, right? 00:02:20 Uh, in something like this, you gotta be, uh, with, uh, exact emerge and, and the brush belt, right? Uh, to, to really start out at that point in time. So 00:02:28 We may brush belt, then we go to exact shot. Yeah. Then, then, Then we're gonna look at, hey, 00:02:31 are you running fertilizer today? Right? We, you know, kind of starting to have some of those conversations and just 00:02:36 where they're at in their tech journey. Right. You talked about there, you said the the brush belt. Yeah. You upgrade the brush brush belt. 00:02:41 You could drive faster through the field, maintain your planting, uh, excellence that you want to have your, your quality. 00:02:48 You could potentially far more acres with one planter. You could potentially get rid of a planter because of the speed 00:02:53 and the productivity that you'll gain right there. But to me, the greatest savings of all time, exact shot's. Great. The greatest signal of all time is row shutoffs. 00:03:02 Yeah. So before we recorded, we first started recording, you talked about this and you're 00:03:06 like, I saved, what'd you say? Like a third on seed or a fourth on seed. We saved 10%. Okay. 10% on seed. Yeah. 00:03:12 So Kelly Farms, and for the viewer that may not understand this in Iowa, Iowa's great. Well, I was not square and flat. 00:03:17 You might think that, but in less, in the less hills in the northwest part of the state where he is, there's a lot of curve 00:03:23 and there's a lot of this. So all of a sudden, in the old days, you were planting seed, right? 00:03:27 Where you had just planted seed. That's right. And so 10% on, uh, 300 bag of corn. There you go. It's 30 bucks. And the other easy math, 00:03:34 The the other piece there too is just, uh, moving to an electric meter, like exact emerging brush belt, uh, you know, on that, it's not only the seed savings, 00:03:43 you're reducing your yield anytime that you're overlapping, right? That's right. So you're getting, 00:03:46 you're getting hit multiple times on things like that. I Used to ask my dad, I'd be like, well, what do you think 00:03:50 that double planted corn yields? And my dad said half at most, Not double, right? Not 00:03:55 Double. No. It's half at most it's One steal from the other. Yes. Because it's too thick. 00:03:59 All of a sudden, your plant own eight 30,000. Now we've got 60,000 plants there. And then if they, if you have a windstorm yes, 00:04:05 where the hole starts Yep. Where that double planted corn is, and then it works out from there, 00:04:08 because you've got a c***k in the arm, right? 1, 1, 1 corn plant became a weed to the other corn plant Here. Here's another cool thing. 00:04:15 You know, we talk about two third savings with a, with a exact shot. How many times do you fill up though? 00:04:20 Now if you're, if your savings two, uh, two thirds of that, uh, of that fertilizer, you're not stopping 00:04:25 and filling this tank very often, right? So your productivity also increases. Which man, I, I've talked to some guys that they're like, 00:04:31 we love it because it's sinking our seed fill up with our first set of, uh, fill up. Typically you'll see a lot of 500 gallon inferral tanks. 00:04:41 Every a hundred acres, you're gonna fill up five gallon rates. Pretty tip. Now all of a sudden you're gonna fill up what, 00:04:45 once every three days, once every two days. You know, Last thing on this, if I wanna do plan for upgrades, do I have to change stuff in the 00:04:52 tractor to make this all work? Am I spending money's neat to say, oh yeah, you can pay for this in the, in the first year, my up am I have 00:04:57 to pay stuff, new stuff in my tractor. Yeah. So there are, there are some upgrades that are tied together, right? 00:05:02 Uh, so with, uh, with exact shot, we're running on this, uh, with our seed star five, uh, architecture on the, on that, 00:05:08 which actually requires a G five display as well. But that's where we have our, uh, precision essentials kit that allows somebody to get the, the G five display, uh, m 00:05:16 or an m or an R modem and a, uh, sf, uh, 7,500 receiver all packaged together. You select what license you want on that, whether, you know, 00:05:26 essentials or advanced, uh, just justify the, the First year. Uh, yeah, I mean, you, you can I think so. 00:05:32 I think, I think every farmer needs to, needs to always go through and calculate that ROI for, 00:05:37 for their savings, right? Because I, I can't answer that in the one year aspect because it all depends on how much your tank, how, 00:05:43 how much mix is your tank, right? If you're running a $7, uh, an acre mix, your R OI is not gonna be there as fast. 00:05:52 Right. But if you're running a 30 or 40 Mix is very easy to Do. Exactly. So, so it really, I always say like, 00:05:58 you gotta look at your operation and calculate that ROI based on what you're utilizing today. Now having a savings like this, you may take that, 00:06:07 you may be doing $7, uh, an acre today and maybe now I can jump up, right? And I can put a few more, few more little, uh, 00:06:14 little aspects in there to, uh, to help. You can actually afford to mix your, your solution a little hotter. 00:06:21 And then the dose that's going on there is more affordable because you're not putting on that five gallons. 00:06:27 And we have tried that and we've actually documented a yield gain. I thought this was gonna be impossible. 00:06:31 I, like Evans wanted to do it. I thought it was a waste of time. We had a yield gain out 00:06:35 and there was another ROI that we added because of this technology, Talking about planter upgrades 00:06:41 that you can put into your planter and actually get a huge payoff right away because we know that farm economy's a little bit tight. 00:06:47 You don't have to go and break the bank on new machinery. You can upgrade what you have. He's clin Chaffer. 00:06:51 Kelly Garrett. We're gonna move over to the sprayers now 00:06:54.685 --> 00:06:56.605