Farmers are prepping their equipment for the 2020 planting season, and many will be employing Kinze’s advanced, easy-to-use Blue Vantage display. But for those unfamiliar with what’s to come, the Blue Vantage lineup of 2021 enhancements is already yielding excitement.
Eric Broadbent, Kinze’s director of sales for North America, said the next-generation Blue Vantage is a hot topic as its upgrades were born from focus groups with customers already using the display.
Kinze Blue Vantage features the most intuitive interface in the industry. The rugged 12-inch touchscreen offers a durable high-definition, direct-view, anti-glare screen with a quick disconnect tablet dock and USB port for easy removal and data transfer. And as current customers know, the quick set-up requires only three clicks for farmers to go from turning on to planting. The hitch-pin ready design means any grower of any skill level can take it right out of the box and put it work. And the 2021 model will usher in even more additions and benefits.
“A lot of these new features came directly from the feedback from our farmers,” Broadbent said, explaining Kinze’s use of farmer focus groups facilitated by product specialists.
All Kinze planters equipped with the company’s Blue Drive electric drive in 2021 will offer the enhanced Blue Vantage display package, meaning the 3665, 4705, and 4905 high-tech models, he said. Despite the added features, simplicity is still at the heart of the system.
“The one thing that really separates it from anything else in the market is the simplicity of it,” Broadbent said. “That was one of the core principles that guided us through the project from its inception. We wanted it to be very easy for anybody to use it. We wanted the technology to work for the user, not the other way around.”
New and improved
Whether one wants to use the trademarked three-step system to simply touch-and-go or really maximize its data capabilities, Broadbent said farmers of all kinds will be impressed. The 2021 enhancements include:
- Additional planting and crop reports, featuring improved maps and data, that can be exported without needing farm management software. Included is data showing crop input applications as a percentage of the target.
- True Point single point map detail, which enables the operator to visually zoom in to a 5-inch point at any spot in the field to see where any seed was planted and harvest all of the data from that time and location, including vac and ground pressure.
- Enhanced diagnostics and instructional documents to help the operator troubleshoot on his own.
- Integration of Kinze’s hydraulic downforce system, True Depth, into Blue Vantage instead of requiring its own separate display. This upgrade provides the operator with row-by-row mapping detail and planter control on a single display, including ground contact, applied force and sensed force.
“It really does help with wet fields,” Broadbent said of True Depth, which adjusts down pressure to achieve desired depth and optimum seed placement and reduce sideway compaction. This provides the farmer with peace of mind to know that they’ve done the absolute best job they can with their planting, irrespective of weather conditions and other variables, he said.
Kinze’s new True Speed high-speed 4905 planter, to be introduced next season, will also be controlled from the Blue Vantage display screen, complete with system diagnostics and high-definition mapping. True Speed will allow farmers to plant at speeds of up to 12 miles per hour with precision. Based on a new high-speed electric meter and seed delivery tube, the system affords total seed control from the disc to belt to seed trench, enabling farmers to double the acres planted in a day.
The bottom line
These and other upgrades, including several operator usability enhancements, are all supported through the Blue Vantage interface, which is designed for anyone regardless of technology experience. Whether a grower simply wants the ease of a three-steps-and-go system or would like to harvest fertilizer or fan-pressure data at the row-by-row level, even down to the seed, the 2021 upgrades made by Kinze showcase the industry’s most important planter innovations. And while farmers who use the current Blue Vantage display will be able to incorporate the software upgrades into their system, new customers will be able to get started with this top-of-the-line ag industry technology.
This article was published on behalf of Kinze.
