KINDRED, N.D. - Dave Braaten thought he was right last April when he put up an "RTK" tower and fitted his tractors and equipment at a cost of about $75,000.

"It all came together right at planting," Braaten recalls.

He knew he was right in May, when the wind was howling and his field men were able to use centimeter accuracy to "blind-cultivate" newly planted sugar beets. It was impressive.

"We'd had a tough spring," Braaten says, recalling the week of May 10. "We'd seeded beets about April 15, but we hadn't gotten a drop of rain. The top 1½ inches was the consistency of just plain sugar. It was like a desert."

Sure enough, the wind started blowing and "things started to drift," Braaten says. He sent his men out to "throw up some slabs, some lumps" of cultivated soil to protect a 600-acre square field that he expected to drift. The beets were in 22-inch rows. The men soon reported that they'd lost all visual reference points for the rows.

"We were using the RTK when we started cultivating but could still see the rows." Without the visual confirmation, they didn't know how it would work with 16-inch-wide tracks. The cultivator worked with a 4-inch-wide space.

Believing his beets, nestled in a 4-inch-wide band were worth saving because they hadn't yet emerged and weren't yet vulnerable to the cutting wind and soil particles, Braaten told the men to go ahead and cultivate the whole thing using the RTK. It was a sort of blind faith. If the cultivator tore up the beets, he'd lose both the time, the fuel and the crop, and he wouldn't know it until a week later.

"I thought, you've got to be on the money or you're going to wipe out those beets." Braaten says. Braaten ended up losing 60 acres out of 1,400 acres of beets to the wind.

"We had one field we had to replant, but the big field was fine. We would have lost it. We would have because it's too big a field to stop.

"If we'd had to replant that field, it'd probably be in the neighborhood of $50,000," he says.

Pushing forward

Braaten, 37, graduated from high school in 1986. He's been farming since 1988, at first with his parents, Elder and Eleanor Braaten. Farming always has been exciting and a family heritage. One of the highlights of his young life was when the Queen of Norway was visiting the region and toured the farm in 1978.

Full of optimism, Braaten bought his first 25 acres of American Crystal sugar beet stock in 1987 to go with the 270 acres his father already owned. The youngest of five, Braaten attended North Dakota State University in Fargo, where he studied agricultural economics, but he returned to the farm just shy of earning his degree. Elder retired in the mid-1990s.

Today, Braaten and his wife, Teresa, are the farming partners. They have four children, ages 2 to 9. Their beet acreage has grown to 1,700 acres, and the total acreage has expanded accordingly.

"I like to push," Braaten says of the farming game. "I like to push to get the crop in. I like to push to get it off."

Braaten attributes his farm's growth the good fortune of "being in the right spot at the right time," but acknowledges technology has been a part of it. In 1987, Elder Braaten bought his first Caterpillar Challenger.

"Back then, I thought he was crazy," Braaten says laughing. "I was a freshman in college. I suppose I thought, 'Gee, we could buy a Versatile for a lot less.'"

In the heavy, Fargo clay soil, the Cat tracks helped eliminate the wheel-track issues. Newer-style tracked tractors with the narrow widths further reduced the problem. Braaten has owned a half-dozen track-style yellow and green tractors over the years.

In the early 1990s, Braaten started using a laser system for leveling land.

"We'd had our butt handed to us because it was so wet in 1993," Braaten says. "Today, lasers are pretty much the norm; it's pretty hard to go out and ditch without one. You don't feel very comfortable with guesswork."

In 1999, the Braatens bought their first air seeder - not brand-new technology, but new for his area of the Red River Valley - the double-disk air delivery system.

"It's allowed us to plant a lot faster, and very accurate," he says.

The 'RTK' experiment

When GPS came along, Braaten immediately saw benefits, but also potential pitfalls.

"We demo'd an auto-steer tractor in 2003," Braaten says. "I knew they wanted to sell it to us, but I was kind of hesitant. I can't be the only one who can use it; I have a lot of different guys driving. When the dealer was here at my office, I said to my hired guy, Bud, he should come out and try it. If he can use it, we can talk."

"Bud" is Allen Lahren, 72, and he loved it.

"I thought, 'Bud has been driving tractors since he's 14,'" Braaten says. "If he's not afraid of the technology, maybe we shouldn't be either."

This past winter, Braaten looked seriously at the things he could do with such a system. He'd started with the so-called "WAAS" system in 2003, a free signal with 4- to 12-inch accuracy. He started considering the benefits of centimeter- accurate RTK. Braaten used computer spreadsheets to calculate how much the RTK accuracy could help him. Fuel, labor, inputs - everything seemed to add up.

"The tractor is burning 20 gallons an hour, so that's $27 an hour. You're paying a man roughly $10 an hour," he says. "If you're renting a large tillage tractor at $40 an hour, pretty soon you're at $75 an hour, aren't you. You can multiply that for every pass you make and every tractor."

Braaten put up his tower in April, equipping it with technology from Deere. He bought the tower used from a tower company in Fargo. The "guyed" tower cost about $3,000. He installed a permanent base station receiver on a 6-foot post for some $16,000. He equipped three tractors at $17,000 per tractor. He plans to do three combines for $3,300 each.

"You can take the sensors out of the tractors and put them in the combines," Braaten says. "You put in a wiring harness, moisture sensor and get the combine set up for the yield mapping."

One of the benefits of the electronic mapping is his ability to manage without always being there. If sugar beets and soybeans are being harvested at the same time, Braaten says, he's likely to stick with the beet operation, which involves trucks, two lifters, two toppers and shift changes.

"When the first rainy day rolls around, I can sit down, put the computer chip in and see what the soybean fields are doing - if it's a good variety, whether it needs to be drained," Braaten says.

He can even know how many times a combined stopped - if there's a problem with the machine or how many acres it runs.

"It work really well with the belted tractors," Braaten says, noting that they are steered completely electronically, not mechanically.

RTK is especially helpful in Braaten's share crop arrangements, he says. One 2,200-acre deal involves 24 landlords. Because he can provide landowners with accurate RTK yield data, cross-checked with grain cart scale figures, he eliminates the need to keep grain separated in 23 small bins he used to use.

"Our labor costs to get those bins emptied out were terrible," Braaten says. "Now we can load a truck in 11 minutes and we're gone. But you've got to have good landlords that can accept that" electronic yield evidence.

In the future, Braaten wants to get to the point where he can apply his own fertilizer, using RTK.

"This fall, we'll use it," he says. "In the spring, we're going to come in and plant right on top of it. Exactly on top of it. That should allow us to reduce our fertilizer cost because it's so available and it's right underneath the plant."

Braaten's equipment operators report that with auto-guided steering, they have less stress and fatigue. They can spend more time looking back to watch the equipment. Besides the blind-cultivation episode, Braaten also has used the system to replant sugar beets at night to beat a predicted early morning rain.

"We went right back in, put the seed right on top of the fertilizer we'd put on the first time. We were within an inch, a sub-inch. And the best part is we seeded all night long, till 6 to 7 a.m., and we didn't have a marker," Braaten says. "This technology is wonderful."

Braaten is looking forward to a grid of towers, under development in the Red River Valley by the new, Rural Tower Network L.L.C. His own system covers 85 percent of his farm, with a range of about 10 miles.

"I wish I could be a part of a grid and run off of other towers and other systems. I'd love to run my Cat Challenger off my tower," Braaten says. "There's no reason for everybody to put up their own towers. We should get together and make it work."

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