In the red river valley most use variable rate for ferts and seeding, auto steer, precision planter/seeder tech., wider suspension boom sprayers (get rid of extra tire tracks), and everything else. Crop prices have dropped a lot here so payback's are elongated for those adapting late. I'd be more concerned about your roi on the farm as opposed to trying to keep up with the jones's. Every farm is different too. Best investment for me has been GPS, looking for other things to add as well. I'm a small weekend farmer, so can't buy everything while keeping a tolerable risk level.
Precision Ag
What are growers findings, fuel savings, increased yields, reduced labour going down the precision ag path. Zero till, tramlines, variable rate tecnology, yield mapping, soil mapping how have you put these different practises into place on your property and what benifits you have seen. I have been mostly zero till now for about 12 years and full on tramlines for the last 6 years. We have a single disc Excel planter and Simplicity airseeder for our narrow row planting and fertilizing and a JD Maximerge planter for our wide row planting both being 12 metres, our tractors, sprayer, combine and bins are all on 3 metre centres, our Lexion combine has a fantastic residue spreader on it, we use to have dramas in the centre of the tramlines with the mat of chaff at planting but that is no longer a problem, this year we left applying our nitrogen until after we got the crop up using RTK and our Excel planter to apply urea between the rows it worked very well this gave us the opportunity to tailor the rate of urea to the seasonal out look. Our agronomist is going down the precision ag path now which is great, they will start using our yield data and once we the fields soils mapped they can over lay both lots of data and come up with prescriptions for variable rate fertilizer and seeding applications to hopefully increase yield potential on better country and decrease costs on our not so good dirt, but like all the latest greatest ideas it all cost big bucks to set gear up for, so I thought I would ask the question what benifits have you seen on your farm and what ideas have you implemented pros and cons. No sense reinventing the wheel 
