John Deere Introduces Affordable Guidance Systems

Dec 03, 2008

Decisions on what to plant next year are going to be hard to make, especially if commodity prices don’t rebound. So for producers who had hoped to enter the world of precision guidance systems for tractors, there is timely news from John Deere. They have introduced a new low-cost entry-level guidance solution. Laura Robson, Senior Marketing Representative in guidance at John Deere said the new equipment includes the “StarFire 300 receiver, which is WAAS capable. So it receives that free government signal and gets you within plus or minus thirteen inches. And there is the GreenStar Lightbar, which helps producers manually guide their machines through the field keeping them accurately on the path. This is definitely the first step when we look at guidance solutions. It is a manual guidance solution so you still have your hands on the wheel and you’re visually looking at that lightbar to tell you where to drive.”

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Video: Evolution of Beef Cattle Farming

The Clear Conversations podcast took to the road for a special episode recorded in Nashville during CattleCon, bringing listeners straight into the heart of the cattle industry. Host Tracy Sellers welcomed rancher Steve Wooten of Beatty Canyon Ranch in Colorado for a wide-ranging discussion that blended family history and sustainability, particularly as it relates to the future of beef production.

Sustainability emerged as a central theme of the conversation, a word that Wooten acknowledges can mean very different things depending on who you ask. For him, sustainability starts with the soil. Healthy soil produces healthy grass, which supports efficient cattle capable of producing year after year with minimal external inputs. It’s an approach that equally considers vegetation, animal efficiency, and long-term profitability.

That philosophy aligned naturally with Wooten’s involvement in the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, where he served as a representative for the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association. The roundtable brings together the entire beef supply chain—from producers to retailers—along with universities, NGOs, and allied industries. Its goal is not regulation, Wooten emphasized, but collaboration, shared learning, and continuous improvement.