Kirkwood students soup up John Deere planter

CEDAR RAPIDS - When a 40-foot-wide planter is moving through a cornfield at about twice normal planting speed, everything needs to be operating correctly.

About 45 Kirkwood Community College students were able to get valuable, hands-on, 'real world” experience this year when they were tasked with upgrading a late-model John Deere planter in a partnership with P&K Midwest in Mount Vernon.

'We have really tried to reach out to some dealers in the community to give students some real world, firsthand experience working on (agricultural) equipment that they might encounter in their jobs,” said James Jordan, an instructor in Kirkwood's agricultural sciences program.

'We have developed a couple of really good partners - P&K Midwest in Mount Vernon and Del-Clay Farm Equipment in Edgewood. They deliver equipment to us and allow students to look at it and develop a list of parts that it might need for repair and maintenance.

'We order the parts, the students install them, and they make all of the necessary fine-tuning adjustments so the machine is ready to go.”

Jordan said some farmers want additional technology, such as hydraulic downforce sensors to keep each row unit on a planter engaged with the ground or electric drives than run the meters in the row units for extremely precise seed placement.

'The course is called precision agricultural hardware, but it's machinery servicing and retrofitting,” he said. 'It's a cooperative project between the agricultural geospatial technology program and the diesel mechanics program, which is taught by Eric Conklin.

”Eric is a really great mechanic. I don't think I would have tackled the retrofit without his expertise.”

John Deere has created the retrofit package for older planters to upgrade them to its new ExactEmerge technology. It enables corn and soybean planters to increase planting speed while improving accuracy and performance.

Kirkwood received the ExactEmerge kit, worth about $65,000, along with manuals detailing how to install the equipment. Jordan said the students were asked to evaluate the manual for how well the instructions were written.

'Sometimes a student would say that the manual called for installing a particular part, but they did not know which part was correct,” Jordan said. 'I told them to figure it out and write down the part number next to the instruction for future reference.

'They also had situations where the manual told them to install something one way, but they found it much easier to do it another way. It was an interesting project, although a little terrifying from an instructor standpoint because it was such a new concept.”

The John Deere planter was shipped directly to an Oklahoma customer of P&K Equipment, corporate parent of P&K Midwest, from Kirkwood after the students completed the retrofit. Kevin Gunderson, P&K Midwest service manager, said the dealership has had a close partnership with Kirkwood for number of years.

'We have had students come out here for internships and we've had several students through the Kirkwood program that we have hired as full-time technicians,” Gunderson said. 'Typically, we would have done the planter upgrade in our shop, but with our agreement with Kirkwood, we worked out that they had the opportunity to make the installation and learn as they were doing it.

'Our agreement with them included testing the planter when the work was completed to get the operational experience.”

Scott Ermer, Kirkwood dean of agricultural sciences, said the students faced an additional challenge.

'We have a ‘red' Case IH Magnum tractor that they were connecting to a ‘green' John Deere planter,” Ermer said. 'The engineers are designing a tractor so it's an integral part of the planter that it's pulling. It's designed to communicate back and forth.”

Ermer said the students needed to figure out how to make the planter and tractor compatible.

'It required them to use critical-thinking skills, which is something we teach in all our programs,” he said. 'When a farmer has a piece of equipment go down, he needs to use critical thinking skills along with basic knowledge to get it going again.”