A young no-tiller just made history in New Haven, Ky., becoming the first in the state to plant his entire corn crop with a driverless tractor. Looking to slash equipment costs, Quint Pottinger went all in on autonomy, replacing his two big tractors and planters with a small tractor, an 8-row planter and a Sabanto autonomy kit.

The 8^th-generation farmer autonomously no-tilled corn green into cereal rye. And as you can see in this video, it went even smoother than he expected across 850 acres. While many in the equipment world are pushing bigger and faster, Quint says he’s going smaller and slower, and it’s paying off.

“That’s the messaging that’s coming from the equipment manufacturers, spend the money so you can plant faster, you can till faster and you can get the crop in quickly. And their point is don’t have two 40-foot planters, have one 40-foot planter that you can run at 10 mph. We took a different approach. We said, you know what, we’re going to get rid of two 40-foot planters and we’re going to go with a 20-footer and we’re going to slow down because we have time and that’s what we’ve seen. So instead of planting 4.5-5 mph, we’re planting at 3.5 mph and that sucker is running 16, 20 hours a day and we’re getting better seed placement, we’re getting better crop stands than we could have ever hoped for, especially in no-till. Slow down. Let the equipment do the work.” 

Pottinger notes he’s the first in the world to do this without it being a company or research project receiving financial assistance. All in all, this setup cost him $200,000, compared to his old equipment setup that cost $750,000.

Watch the full Video of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.