From GPS to Autonomy

Jonathan Kinzenbaw has worn many hats over his career both on and off the farm. From working in IT for  a Fortune 500 company to consulting farmers on their agronomic data utilization to farming his own farm today. But across each stop there’s been one constant: technology.

This culmination of different careers and experiences has put him, in his words, “on the cutting edge but not the bleeding edge” of implementing digital and precision ag technology on his 2,000 acre farm in Indianola, Iowa. At the 2024 Farm Progress Show, Jonathan participated in a panel discussion on his experiences with digital and precision ag technology, and what he sees as the realistic possibilities for the future. Here is his perspective.

Q:  Can you share your first experience working with precision technology in the cab of your tractor or combine?  

A:  I grew up in Williamsburg, Iowa, and my first experience with technology was probably when I was a teenager in the early to mid-1990s. I remember Dad getting a basic yield monitor in the cab that was not hooked up to some kind of GPS. It just simply recorded (yield) data and had a display on the screen with a sensor. That was pretty remarkable because now we have the ability to see the variance in the field as we move across it. That was the start, and of course it wasn’t long after that they started hooking GPS coordinates to it. Up until the late 2000s that was the extent of it for Dad. We wouldn’t do much with the yield data, but we had it if we wanted it.

To some extent, I was a late adopter to the auto-steer world. I grew up in a time where you took pride in a farmer being able to plant straight rows simply by looking out across the field. My Dad had these large wide, open fields. And when I moved to the Des Moines-area, it’s much hillier. You have nothing to sight on as you look out across the field, so the rows weren’t straight anymore.

Q:  What changed the tide for you from late adopter to being more, in your words, on the cutting edge?

A:  There were a number of reasons why I wanted to get into precision ag using GPS coordinates. I wanted to test some variable rate inputs with my new hydraulic-drive planter, and we had to have GPS for that. And so, we put GPS auto-steer on that tractor. Once I realized the true benefit of auto-steer it was a steep curve from there to adopting everything we could. Within four to five years, we had moved everything to full RTK signal. I’m using driven RTK boundaries and waterways for all of my shut offs.

Q:  How did your time off the farm impact your view of how digital and precision technology can elevate an operation?

A:  In about 2008-2009, I lost my job at Principal Financial Group. I was working in the IT area, and I ultimately got in with Pioneer Seed and one of their subsidiaries, MapShots. I worked with a lot of precision data there. We were taking farmers’ yield data and planting data and meshing that together to produce yield by variety information. And so now, it took the next step. We had planting data, harvest data, yield maps, and we were overlaying that sometimes with LiDAR data, or we were overlaying that more commonly with soil maps. We were figuring out how we can drive not so much a perfect yield map with everything across the field being the same, but how we can make our profit map look the same. If we’ve got lower yielding areas of the field, we turn down what we put in those areas and we crank it up in the areas that we know we can push so you make each acre equally profitable. That was a fun challenge, and I really enjoyed that.

Q:  We’ve talked about your pathway to precision technology. What were your first thoughts about this type of technology? 

A:  I think some of it was skepticism. We were trusting a lot of information to an electronic sensor. I tend to be a cutting-edge person, but not a bleeding-edge person. A lot of times, on the bleeding edge, there is still so much that has not been proven yet. You can blow a lot of money in a hurry trying to be on the bleeding edge. We’re cutting edge. When you’re on the cutting edge, you’re still out there tackling the new cool stuff. That just means the technology has been tested, tried and proven. Now we’re going to implement it and see what we can do with it. And so, I think that skepticism was probably appropriate. But if I take a step back and look at a feature like auto-steer, it’s blown me away what has transpired. It was 2012 when I first put in auto-steer and in the last 12 years, it’s amazing how that’s all come together.

Q:  You say you’ve been blown away by the precision ag technology. Are you talking about the auto-steer components, the access to data, that kind of thing?

A:  I think we’re finally at the point where we’re realizing how to integrate all these technologies. One of the challenges for me is I have always had a mixed operation fleet. I have more New Holland equipment now than I’ve ever had, but let’s face it, most farmers can’t afford to go out and just trade their whole fleet in for one brand. 

We run a mix of equipment on our farm, and it’s been neat to see how we can tie that together. I can take the data out of my New Holland combine and feed it into a third-party program, spit it back out and get yield by variety information. As I’m moving across the field, when the decisions are most impactful in your mind, you’re sitting there in the combine and you think, “Man, this looks like really good corn. It’s really yielding.” Well, I’ll look up on the screen and I can see what variety it is. That makes a core memory in your mind, so when you go to buy seed for next year, you say that one really rung the bell. 

When you think about all the pieces that have to come together, you have to have good, clear GPS coordinates. You have to have the ability to talk between mixed fleets and be able to work with that. You have to be able to take variety data from your planter and put it over into your combine. It’s just fascinating to me how we’ve finally arrived at the point where I trust the electronics far more than I trust my gut anymore when I’m moving across a field.

Q:  Can you share an example of how a New Holland piece of technology gets leveraged on your farm?

A:  I do variable-rate fertilizer. I can plug a boundary into my IntelliView™ 12 display and I can drive that boundary. I know that I’m spreading right up to the fence line, but I’m not giving any fertilizer to my neighbor because when you’re spreading 120 feet wide, you know the dollars per second that you’re spending is astounding, so the savings from that technology adds up very quickly. Using shut offs to make sure that we’re not overspreading has an environmental benefit as well.

Q:  We’ve talked about GPS, auto-steer and some of the other pieces, but are there any recent additions to the technology suite you have access to that you’d like to call out?

A:  I think FieldOps™ is really cool because we’ve gone from something that can just take a look at your data and tell you where your tractors are at to something that you can use to analyze your data. I’ve got a new New Holland T7.300 tractor and a New Holland CR8.90 combine. Those two machines are able to talk within that FieldOps app. I can have my data come in automatically where I can then work with it and have that data flow in. So, at night from my phone, I can just pull up the app and see what has been done and if there were any errors or anything to catch. If the tractor is throwing an error code, it will come up and tell you on the FieldOps app. Those are some of the things that we’ve adopted.

Another thing that’s going to make a difference is implement guidance. I think that will be commonplace in the next couple of years. If you know how a planter pulls a tractor through the field, when you get on a hill that planter will drift ever so slightly. It might be on your guidance line with the tractor, but that planter naturally wants to drift. This kind of technology knows where the tractor is at, but there’s also an implement receiver on the planter, so it can create guidance lines that the planter and the tractor can directly follow across the field. Then, my sprayer guy can go through the field with his sprayer and be right dead on. I think having the ability to integrate those guidance lines and move them from machine to machine and be able to go through the field and then share all of that through the cloud through a platform like FieldOps is where the next phase of technology is going.

Q:  This next question pertains to what’s to come. We talk about things like autonomous tillage and driverless technology. What do you think about some of the newer technology that’s on the horizon? Where do you see them fitting in on your operation?

A:  I think that autonomy is a fascinating thing, but you have to walk before you run. I believe autonomy in its fullest form isn’t yet possible in terms of people just sitting in their office and letting their tractors go out and work. We’re at least 10 years away from that. But we’re seeing a lot of things that will take autonomy to the next level. Things like Grain Cart Automation is where the technology is beginning to show. I think there’s a huge place for that. 

The way I see it, autonomy isn’t going to be about me firing people from my farm. I can take a guy who is much more capable than doing the task of driving a grain cart across the field and I can let him do something more important, like getting in the semi and hauling grain. I think being able to re-appropriate how you’re using your staff is a huge part of this.

Q:  What are some of the factors that are going to drive your decision-making when new technology comes to the market? 

A:  I’m really excited as to what autonomy brings to the table. One of the challenges I face right now is commodity prices. Every financial decision we make has to be very carefully weighed. But sometimes you have to sharpen your pencil because there may be things that are worth implementing that would improve your bottom line. 

Our New Holland dealer, Kruseman Implement in Sully, Iowa, works with us to stay abreast of new technologies and features. Having an excellent dealer like that in your corner has helped us “keep the wheels on” many times when something gets tricky.

To stay in the game, you have to be willing to try things. I know plenty of farmers who are stuck in the ’90s and they might be willing to consider putting auto-steer on the tractor, but that’s about as far as they’re going to go with it. If you’re going to get serious about farming and growing, you’ve got to be open to all those technologies.