By Chris Aldridge

Kentucky Ag News

Last year, Quint Pottinger sold two big-frame 8000‑series John Deere tractors and two 40‑foot planters that were costing him $100,000 a year in interest.

Pottinger replaced the expensive equipment with one modest 130‑horsepower tractor pulling a 20-foot planter. Using autonomous technology, Affinity Farms near New Haven, became the first farm in Kentucky to plant an entire crop using a tractor without a driver, joining fewer than 50 farms nationwide.

Pottinger, the eighth generation of his family to farm the land in southern Nelson County since 1788, said the two small pieces of equipment easily outplants the corn acreage covered by four huge ones.

“Last year, I was running a 16-row planter and averaging 60-70 acres a day,” Pottinger said. “So far, with an eight-row planter – half the width – we’re hitting close to 100 acres a day, and I’m not in it (driver’s seat)! I just hit the ‘go’ button the other day and watched it plant while I was in a meeting.

“It’s unbelievable. The dang thing runs 20 hours a day. We had cut costs everywhere we could. The only thing left was equipment.”

Pottinger believes other Kentucky farms could also boost efficiency and profitability by buying a smaller, less expensive tractor with no creature comforts like air conditioning or radios – “Don’t need ’em!” he noted – and fitting it with autonomous technology.

“A farm in Kentucky could probably cut out $1 million of capex (capital expenditures) by using this system,” he reasoned. “We’re returning $400,000 back to the farm this year.

“This is an economic play, not a labor play,” he added, noting he has retained all of his migrant workers and assigned them to other duties. “It’s a game changer…. I was the one doing the planting, so it saves me time, and I can focus on other things. It was all about saving on equipment costs.”

Last fall, Pottinger began using the smaller tractor, retrofitted for automation using a kit from Sabanto, paired with the smaller planter.

“We did it last year with our winter crops,” he said. “We grow barley, wheat, and rye for the whiskey industry, but this is the first year we’ve done it with corn.

“We’re the first farm globally to do it at the farm level without being a research or company project. We received no assistance and paid full retail price for our new equipment without having to go into debt.”

Using GPS, the planter is accurate within 1 cm. About the only thing the autonomous tractor can’t do is back up. Because most fields in Kentucky are not rectangles, Pottinger has to manually run the planter in the corners of his fields. “Typically, we have about 2 acres of corners to fill in for a 30-40 acre field,” he noted.

Pottinger would like to see Kentucky lead the nation in the use of autonomous technology.

“If we can do it in Kentucky with our irregular (shaped) fields, you can do it anywhere,” he said.