Corn and soybean farmer Adam Gittins cautions strip-tillers to control their natural reaction to “sticker shock” when shopping for precision agriculture technology, and to realize the rapid ROI such tools can provide.

Gittins has worked with precision agriculture for nearly 25 years in addition to managing his farm near Harlan, Iowa. He is president of HTS Ag (High Tech Solutions for Agriculture), Precision Farming Dealer’s 2024 Most Valuable Dealership.

“For 30 years, HTS Ag has specialized in introducing growers to technology to help them make more money,” he says. “We’re an Ag Leader Blue Delta partner, and an OPI Advanced Grain Management Hub partner — the top tier of leadership for both companies. We work closely with our partners and help them with product development through farmer feedback.”

Gittins is no stranger to the reluctance of strip-tillers to lay out large sums of cash for the tools he advocates and uses, but he makes the case for wide-spread adoption of farm technology on tractors, combines and sprayers, as well as in grain storage facilities and the farm office with his “fictional 1,000-acre farm” example. In it, he uses conservative estimates to show how a $122,000 investment in digital technology — from the machine shed to the front office — can yield a 95% ROI the first year. “After that, the savings are all yours,” he says.

Illustrating his contentions at the 2024 National Strip-Tillage Conference, Gittins assumed a 1,000-acre corn/soybean operation, with 100,000 bushels of on-farm storage in four 25,000-bushel…