Norman Waldner of the Cedar Grove Colony in Platte, S.D., couldn’t believe his ears during the Friday night banquet of the National No-Tillage Conference last January in St. Louis, Mo.

His name had just been announced as the winner of the 1-year use of a Computrol II monitoring unit and he was almost positive No-Till Farmer Editor/Publisher Frank Lessiter had read the ticket wrong. In fact, Lessiter read the name several times before Waldner came forward to collect his prize.

“There were a lot of people to shake hands with, I’m not used to that,” the first-year attendee chuckles. “But it was a thrill.”

Mounting Up

After the conference concluded, Chuck Fulk of Fulk Agri Services in Platte City, Neb., worked out the details to deliver the planter monitor.

“They delivered it in March,” Waldner explains. “Two weeks before it arrived, Chuck Fulk came up here and showed me how it worked. So when it came, we were able to mount it ourselves on the planter.”

Once the monitor was in the tractor cab, Waldner took it out for a test drive. In fact, he no-tilled 1,500 acres of 30-inch row corn in rotation with soybeans with his new “toy.” To say the least, he was satisfied with its performance.

“The monitor displays how the seed is dropping,” he says. “If you’ve got skips or doubles, it tells you. I was really pleased. It had a hydraulic motor that you could speed up for different rates, which was really nice.

…