Farming Video | How Work Planner Changed the Way Matt & Layne Miles Spray

00:00:00 Hey guys, lane Miles here with Matt Miles, extreme Ag. Um, just kind of wanna go over something that's kind of really changed our operation. 00:00:09 I would say kind of going from, from what I would call old school to new school. Um, and it's the difference of, 00:00:17 of pen and paper and computer. So we've, we've started using op center a lot more and used to, when we did spray orders, we'd come in, 00:00:26 in the mornings, all our guys would be here and dad would the night before write out on a piece of paper exactly, you know, 00:00:32 what fields would go when he, to add 'em all up, how, how many Eggers it was, and then their tank mixes and what they need to put in their spray tanks. 00:00:40 With op center, we're able to use their planning feature work planter, and it's really, really changed the game. 00:00:47 We were able to go in and add, add what's called a plan, select all those fields. It gives us just say a thousand acres, 500 acres, 00:00:56 whatever it may be, and then do our tank mix the same way. So we, it has a list of every field that we need to spray 00:01:03 with the tank mix and what needs to go into each sprayer, not only in in a thousand gallon sprayer, 00:01:08 but a 750 gallon sprayer, 600 gallon sprayer, whichever one we really we're, we're using at that time. That's been really good for, for us, it's been really good 00:01:17 for our guys because for me personally, it's a lot faster and there's not as much user error. 00:01:24 Not only on my part, but on their part as well. Then we don't have to worry about whether or not, you know, I've made a mistake in, in what I've put, 00:01:33 you know, what I'm, what I'm printing off, or that they're not making mistakes on that. They've had to go in and, you 00:01:38 know, refigure something as well. Yeah. And, and what it does also is it gives accountability to the operator. 00:01:45 So number one, you know, we farm a lot of acres, so we're in a lot of different fields at, at time. I think we've got, we probably got over 300 name fields. 00:01:55 It gives the, it gives us, uh, the Three hundred and five, three hundred five Field. Nice. Okay. 00:02:02 So we got 305 fields. We found that in Operation Center. It gives us the confidence to know and the, 00:02:06 and the operator to the competence to know that they're in the right fields spraying the right product. So unless lane checks something wrong, 00:02:14 he checks a corn field. That should be a bean field. It will not even allow the sprayer to spray in that field. The guys, you know, at the beginning, like Lane said, 00:02:24 old school, uh, he's, you're on your 10th crop. I'm on my 35th crop. So, you know, I did everything pencil and paper 00:02:31 and there's a lot of human error in that with the Operation Center. It figures everything for you. You can even track. 00:02:37 So if you got John Doe and you set him up to spray a thousand acres and he sprays the wrong product for some reason, 00:02:46 then you know two things. You know who done it and you know that he didn't go by what the Operation Center said. 00:02:51 That's the only thing it don't do is if you pour the wrong chemical in there, it don't 00:02:55 know that it's the wrong chemical. Right. Other than that, it will not spray unless the field's selected. 00:03:00 When we first started this, the guys were like, nah, I don't know. I, you know, they kinda like my little piece of paper. 00:03:05 In today's world, there's a lot of times Lane have stop on the side of the road and, and do an, uh, do a work order 00:03:12 because he failed to maybe get it to him that day or we started spraying really quick or something like that. We don't hardly ever spray 00:03:19 or do any kind of task now with our equipment that don't go through a work order, and that's from Tilly jump. 00:03:24 Right. You know, so we've got a lot of H two A workers and you know, some of those guys don't even speak English, but you know, you can convert this to, to Spanish, right? 00:03:32 Yeah. Some of the things they do, they've learned to do it. It it, it's like a big mountain you're looking at 00:03:37 and thinking, there's no way I can climb that. And when you get over it, you're like, well, it wasn't that bad when I started. 00:03:42 Uh, we've had a lot of resistance from employees that by one or two years later they're like, 00:03:48 you know, now we understand. Now we know why we're doing this. We brought the guys in how to meeting and we said, okay, we want 00:03:54 to show you why this is so important to us. We first started, most guys look at a yield map, right? That's on operation center. 00:04:01 You can go look at your yield mount, but what are you gonna do with that yield mount? There's so many other tools that intertwine with 00:04:06 that yield map overlaying your fertility mount to your yield map, you know, why is this, why is this down here on the bottom? 00:04:13 Why is this always red? Well, operation Center has elevations in it too. So you can look at the elevations that the tractors do 00:04:19 during their tillage or spraying or whatever and say, okay, well that's a little low on the lower end. We need to improve our drainage here 00:04:26 to increase our bushels to get it like the top end. So like I said, I've said in previous videos, it's almost like a farmer bible, you know, in today's world, 00:04:34 efficiency is, is is the big, is the big word. You know, if you're not efficient, you're not gonna be here anymore. 00:04:41 Operation Center allows you to become very much more efficient. Not even, you know, we started out with RTK 00:04:47 where it's sub one inch, you know, accuracy on, you know, making sure you weren't overlapping three 00:04:53 or four foot on a dis It's gone way beyond that. Now, way beyond that and the yield mount to planting populations, if we got a place 00:05:00 that's yielding over here, why is this yielding this way? We can go look at the elevations, 00:05:04 we can go look at the planting population. Was the planter malfunctioning during that, during that time? 00:05:09 If it is, it's gonna show it to us on operation center. So there's almost no place that you can't go to find your failures 00:05:17 or your successes based on what you get outta the operation center. And with all that, with all that being said on, 00:05:24 on all the different, different data that we can get, it all starts with the work plan because before the work plan, you know, we were having 00:05:32 to do it in cab and that meant instead of spelling field one, they put in number one. Well, that made two fields or variety One 00:05:40 and Variety two, you know, they did it Variety one ONE and that's two different varieties. So I mean, it's, it's come down to, to just being able 00:05:49 to get that data all starts right there, which starts with me. And the good thing is if it gets messed up, it's on me. 00:05:55 It's not on the person that's driving, driving that tractor. So Lane, just do a sample work order, what you would do 00:06:01 for a sprayer, um, next week if we were to fold egg cotton, So if I went into this, to the work planter, 00:06:07 and we'll just select us a a couple fields just to, just so we have it. So there's, there's 250 acres right there, 250.23. 00:06:17 So we know, we know that that's how many we would before had to go and figure up each one of those, of those five fields. 00:06:24 Um, we're gonna go next. I Wanna interrupt you right there too. For years and years and years, the field could be 42 acres 00:06:30 or 38 acres and you really didn't know, I mean, you had a pretty good idea, you know, based on set points you would make, 00:06:37 but that's one thing that's become really accurate for us too. We don't have to worry about how big the field is once we've 00:06:43 been over at one time with a planter operations center tells us exactly how big the field is, 00:06:48 so there's no inefficiency on over mixing or under mixing chemicals when you're doing these work orders. 00:06:53 That's right. And then so from there, you know, we're, we're spraying but we're spraying corn and when we're we go in, 00:07:01 I pre-populate different tank mixes. So as far as like pre-population, I go into to the setup and I, which I can do it from here too, 00:07:10 it's just a little bit slower. But, uh, go in and set and I take our tank mix and, and each chemical that we're gonna use, I put 'em in 00:07:19 and at what rate we're gonna use them. So just say we're gonna use a quart and a pint and a couple ounces, you know, something like that. 00:07:27 It pre-populates that into an actual tank mix. On the same thing, if we're doing plots, we do a lot of plots with extreme ag and we'll go in there 00:07:35 and put this tank mix number one, uh, nature's foliar number one in there. So when we go back and, 00:07:44 and we wanna look at that, our strip trial with different varieties, he's pre putt this in here so we know exactly where all these are gonna be. 00:07:51 It takes the guesswork out at Correct. I used to put up a thousand flags a year where our test plots were 00:07:56 and have to write on the flags, what we were doing, how we were doing it, roll it up, put a rubber band around it so the weather didn't get it, 00:08:02 and then go back in the fall and figure it out. That's all gone now. Yep. So now we, we we're just, we'll click on this one. 00:08:09 It's the 2025 concept here info. And I, and I, and I probably don't have to do this, but I'll, I'll label 'em all in the year 00:08:15 that we're, we're going that way. I kind of keep it all in a, in a order. So I've got that, it's got my rate there 00:08:22 and I can modify it if I want to, on what rate that I want on each one of those fields. Right now we're gonna leave 'em all the same. 00:08:27 I don't ever really change that. Um, what guidance path goes with them. So I'm gonna select all, 00:08:32 'cause I have all, all of my guidance paths that that match right there And explain the guidance, pass it, 00:08:38 Which is just your ab line for the passes that we make, you know, that way they're all on the same ab line. Uh, we're gonna use tractor number one implement, 00:08:50 we're gonna go to a boom, a broadcast sprayer and operator's gonna be Charles. So now we know that Charles used tractor number one 00:08:59 with a broadcast sprayer and he's the one that did it. And if I wanted to go add more equipment, you know, and send it to multiple tractors, I can, 00:09:07 I mean I can send it to as many tractors as I want and with as many operators in implements work order number, number five, and I want work instructions to be, 00:09:17 to start by the whale. Literally put anything you want to hit safe, I can send it to whatever tractor that I have labeled on there that I've, 00:09:27 that I've done for the day. This has been a game changer for us. It's been a game changer with our employees. 00:09:33 Just, just showing them why this is so important. Uh, even all the way down to what, I don't wanna say end user when mom gets this data. 00:09:41 So we try to make sure that our data's as clean as possible and using Work Planner has been 00:09:46 pretty much number one for that. 00:09:47.675 --> 00:09:47.965