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Pro tip: my uncle's 40 year old seed drill still beats the new one on our 160 acres
My uncle ran a 1984 no till drill on our 160 acres near Ames, Iowa until last spring, and when he finally traded up I figured he was way overdue. Then I looked at his field records and did a double take. Over the last 6 seasons his old unit averaged 2.1 bushels per acre better on beans than the neighbor's 2021 model, mostly because he rebuilt the closing wheels himself every winter for about $90 in parts. The new rig has sensors and auto shutoffs and all that, and yeah it saves him some seed on the headlands, but he says he spends more time in the cab staring at a screen than watching the row units. I'm not saying old iron always wins, because it doesn't, but we act like newer is automatically better and the yield maps on our own farm don't back that up. What's the one piece of old equipment on your place you refuse to replace, and what does it actually save you each year?
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allen.kai29d ago
Man, that story hits home. We still run my grandpa's old chisel plow and a 1978 grain drill that my dad swears by, and every time we talk about upgrading my mom brings up the same thing: the old stuff was built to be fixed, not replaced. That line about your uncle staring at a screen instead of watching the row units really gets me, because that's exactly what my dad says when he rides in a neighbor's new rig. There's something to be said for knowing your machine so well you can hear when a bearing is going bad before any sensor ever would. It's not about being stuck in the past, it's about not throwing away something that still does the job better than the shiny new thing.
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