Name: 農家だけど「現代農業の経営」について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T15:02:46.000Z
Duration: 25 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Well, y'all not letting me ease into this episode.

You hit me with a haymaker right from the get go.

I grow cotton, corn, soybeans, and wheat here in Tennessee.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

How do you get your straight, regular lines in your fields?

Seems to me that farmers take some pretty serious pride in having perfectly straight rows in their fields.

Well, I'd like to say it's all due to operator ability.

Most of our modern tractors that we use now have what we call autosteer.

The onboard computer is the one that's actually doing the steering of the tractor as we're going through the field.

I tell you what, let's actually go to the field and I will show you how this works.

Autosteer is possible because of the GPS systems that we have on this tractor.

When we get to the field, we'll set what we call a guidance line.

To get a straight row, we set what we call an AB line.

That means that we will put the tractor in the position that we want.

On the computer, we will go to the other end of the field and we will mark a B point.

And then the computer will draw a perfectly straight line between the A point and the B point, hit our autosteer button, and the tractor takes over and will actually steer to the line.

And then that line will then be repeated across the field.

And that's how farmers get their perfectly straight lines in the field.

This next one is from the Homestead subreddit.

What are your must-have tools equipment on the farm?

For one thing, we need a tractor to pull the various implements that we need to raise crops, whether it be a planter, a plow, a sprayer to apply pesticides.

We need a harvest machine to be able to harvest the crop.

A combine or a combine harvester can actually harvest multiple different crops, but all of them are going to be grain.

If you're growing other types of crops, you're probably going to need a specific type of harvester just for that crop.

If you're a grain farmer and you want to be able to take a maximum advantage of the commodity market and sell your crops at the highest prices, you might need a system of grain bins in order to store that crop.

You're probably going to need several equipment sheds to store your equipment under because this equipment is hundreds and thousands of dollars and you don't want it sitting outside in the weather during the times that you're not going to use it.

How do you keep track of what you're growing, how much you're growing, and when to harvest?

Use any tools, apps, spreadsheets, farm software to help manage costs, sales, or inventory.

There's a multitude of different tools that we use.

Just about every time that we make a trip across the field, the tractors or harvester or sprayer that we're using has an onboard computer that is logging what we're actually doing.

This is a map of one of our fertilizer applications.

The red parts of the field indicate where we were applying more fertilizer, whereas the green parts are where we were applying less fertilizer, and all of this is based upon the soil test that we pull every two and a half acres across the farm, showing the different levels of fertility.

We're then able to vary the amount of fertilizer we're applying.

This map right here was produced by my combine last year whenever we were harvesting corn.

It represents the varying yields as we go across the field.

Around the edges of the fields, most of that is red because that's a lower yielding area of the field, mainly due to the competition of trees surrounding the field, competing for nutrients and blocking sunlight.

This map represents all the different soil types.

Just because you see dirt out there doesn't mean that all dirt is created equally.

Some soils may be well-drained, some may be poorly drained, some may be highly erodible, some might have greater natural fertility.

So as you can see, there's a lot of different technology that we can use and what ties all of this together is usually a software program that we'll have on our computer that we store all this data on that we can then go in and analyze all this data to determine what we need to do for the next year.

Live City Pajams asks, WTF is a bushel and a peck?

I don't know what a peck is either myself, but I do know what a bushel is.

A bushel is a unit of volume that's used to measure dry goods.

So a bushel of corn is equal to 56 pounds of actual corn, 60 pounds of soybeans, 60 pounds of wheat.

Wesley Rudin asks, how crazy are the GPS systems in the tractors?

The GPS systems on your phone, you know, they're probably only really accurate to within 10 to 20 feet.

Now when we're in the field, we need a lot greater accuracy.

Some of the systems on these tractors can be accurate to within one inch of where you actually are on this earth.

Now this one inch accuracy is possible through the use of RTK on our systems or real-time kinematics using base stations located across an area.

There's a lot of interference between our satellite receiver and the satellites in outer space.

These base stations help correct for that error to let us know within an inch of where exactly we are in the field.

Why do farmers need to be accurate down to the closest inch?

Well, that's because GPS controls a lot more than just actually steering the tractor.

A lot of times part of our equipment is passing over a section of the field that has already been planted.

So we have the ability to shut off row by row as we're going through the field, as we get into an area that's already been planting.

So we're not over applying seed and we're also not spending extra money on inputs that we don't actually need.

There are currently tractors being developed that don't even have a cab, don't even have a place for an operator to sit on and will be operated completely autonomously.

This question is from the subreddit, no stupid questions.

Why does farming have such a high death rate as a job in the USA?

And then not only that, we're dealing with an extremely stressful career and some of us can be facing financial ruins.

I've almost been killed several times on my job.

I was actually ejected through the windshield of my combine harvester as I was going down the road at about 22 miles an hour.

The combine harvester came within about five feet of rolling over me and crushing me.

I came this close to actually losing my life that day and that actually happened because I was in a hurry and I had taken some safety shortcuts that day.

Like, is there just an application for it or do you just start digging?

If you're row crop farming, the one thing you most definitely need is land.

And unless you already own a lot of land, you have to go convince other landowners to allow you to farm their land and show them that you can make a profit for them because they're just not gonna let you farm it for free.

The way I got into farming is that I was actually born into it.

That means that there were four previous generations of Grigs that farmed this ground before I had the opportunity to do it.

Simon Hancock asks, how much profit do you think farmers make?

I can't speak to how much farmers make, but I can tell you how much we made over the last few years.

In 2023, we had a gross income of $1.83 million on our farm.

Now of that gross, $72,000 of that was profit.

That doesn't necessarily mean that $72,000 goes in my pocket and me and my wife can go take a nice fancy vacation.

The vast majority of that $72,000 remained in the business to invest in the next year, whether it's purchasing seed, chemicals, and fertilizer for the next year or making needed investments in equipment.

In 2024, our gross income dropped to $1.65 million.

In fact, we actually wound up losing $300,000 worth of profit and that was even after the government subsidies that we received.

Now, why do we have such a decrease in gross revenue last year?

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農家だけど「現代農業の経営」について質問ある？| Tech Support | WIRED Japan

extremely

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