If you're a believer in the concept that equally spaced stands that emerge uniformly yield the most, then you probably have at least heard of the Precision Planting Seed Sense 20/20 monitor. Other monitors are now appearing that do the same thing, but it was one of the first that actually displayed singulation of seed on the screen in the cab as you planted. That means it showed row by row what percent of the kernels were getting dropped at exactly the right spacing you had dialed in.

Dive into planting data: The newest introduction form Precision Planting is Field View Plus, an extension of Field View that lets you transfer information from the 20/20 Seed Sense monitor to computer software.

When the singulation begins to go away from 100%, you know something is wrong. That's how many people realize they are driving too fast. Many planters still aren't as accurate planting at speeds above 5.0 to 6.0 miles per hour. One of the selling points of the latest planter Kinze just introduced this winter is that it is said to be accurate at speeds from 2 to 8 miles per hour.

If you have the Seed Sense monitor, you may have Field View, a feature added last year to allow you to view on an iPad screen what the planter is seeing in the field. It made it much easier to visualize what was going on with seed spacing, and whether the planter was still accurate or not.

New for this year is Field View Plus. What this added component does, spokespersons say, is let you transfer the information collected by the monitor and displayed in Field View to a computer. That was not possible before.

The Field View Plus upgrade is free to customers with Field View this year. In the future there may be a charge for the service, but since the product is just being introduced, they want more farmers to get a look at it and see what value it has to their recordkeeping and data collection process in their operation.