Winter farm shows

What I like about farm shows isn't really the big companies $1,000,000 equipment but the "inventors showroom" stuff. Lots of neat gadgets. But "The Book" takes care of that too.

Don't think I'm going to Ag Days.

I'll be there tomorrow, planning on being there all day. I guess I fall into the hired hand category though! 😀

Well, here's a bit of list of what I learned/found interesting at agdays today. 1:I'm sure some/all of you already know, but the x9 is gonna start getting powered seperator grate covers this year, finally. 2:Gleaner still doesn't have plans for a proper fully enclosed hopper top when folded,at least that the agco rep knew of. 3: The Khart Spyder drill is really impressive! 4: The Khart raptor stripper header is apparently a reverse engineered Shelbourne with improvements, the biggest being the rotor being driven on both ends, apparently the Shelbourne heads aren't? No deal with Shelbourne, as it is not a close enough copy I guess. 5:Pneu tech tools has some pretty nice looking tire removal tools. 6:Macdon is starting to offer sunflower kits to fit the FD2 heads. Includes plastic pans and an aluminum shield that pushes the sunflowers down a bit before the reel grabs them in order to prevent lots of sunflowers from riding around the reel. That is all the highlights I think.

Yes, quite busy. Seemed like the $20 admission cut down a little on the number of people there that were just goofing off, compared to what I remember of the 2019 ag days. So that was a little plus. As to the Spyder, first off would be the weight/strength. They very clearly built the weight that a disc drill requires into the frame, so everything looked like it was built like a tank. The pivot points for the wing hinges are well below the frame +- about 1foot, so when contouring through ditches and such, the row spacing shouldn't change much compared to most drills. The transport width is also quite narrow compared to most other mfgs, for sure in the larger sizes. The row unit itself looked like a quite well thought out unit, one thing that stood out to me is that they designed it with a vertical pivot above the center of the part of the disc that would be in the dirt, which allows the discs to pivot to track nicely in turns, as well as serve as an extra bit of shock absorption should the disc hit a rock or some such, both of which should hopefully help prolong row unit life. I also like the concept of their undercut double disc opener. It would be very interesting to demo such a unit, but let's just say that it would be a huge jump from what my boss currently runs(a JD 1820), so not likely to happen. Another neat feature it comes with is what I would call(maybe not entirely correctly), a self contained passively active implement guidance system😄. How it works, is on the vertical pivot point that the wagon style hitch up front pivots side to side on, there is a potentiometer that measures the angle of the wheels relative to the frame. There are large hydraulic cylinders on each side of the pivot that can control said pivot. On the center frame of the drill, there is an inclinometer that measures the angle of the hill the drill is on. Using that info from the inclinometer, the system controls the pressure to the two large cylinders to increase the turning resistance of the pivot(not actually turn it, but just increase the force it takes to turn it). The rep said there is a farmer in Saskatchewan that uses one in his controlled traffic operation, and apparently it is the first drill he has had that tracks straight enough to seed between last year's stubble rows on hills. The rep did say that the cylinders being able to actively steer the front wagon hitch was a feature that they are working on adding. The system as it stands can be turned off manually if needed, but if turning on level ground the cylinder pressures will be too low to be an issue. If turning around when on hill (at least on steeper ones) the pressure might be high enough that the hitch wouldn't pivot all that much, but in some circumstances with a heavy tow behind tank, that might actually be a good thing. I think that was about the extent of my observations/things I learned about the Spyder drill. 😀

That's a valid point, I guess we'll have to see. At least this drill has a lot of flotation.

Not sure how they could claim record numbers when before they had no accurate way of counting people, a wild guess at best. The few people I talked to that went said they liked it better because the people there were actually there to look at things, not just racing from booth to booth for the freebies. So my thoughts are if it wasn’t so crowded that you could look at the equipment, that tells me there was less people 🤷‍♂️. I wonder if schools took kids this year if there was an admission? Or possibly no charge for school? The last time I went in was overrun with kids running everywhere, heard some of them had a scavenger hunt going, that was absolutely stupid.

I dunno either.  The guys running the Thunderstruck booth said it was incredibly busy.  Haven't really talked to anyone else.

I hadn't been since probably 2017 or 2018.  One of those years we went to get a show special on 2 way radios for the combines, cart tractor and trucks.