“Newly Innovative Automatic Depth Controller for Peanut Diggers”

Ag-Tastic Solutions of Saint John’s County, Florida and Greentronics Ltd. announce the immediate availability of their 1^st to Market “Automatic Depth controller for Peanut diggers”.

Iron City, GA—Ag-Tastic Solutions of Saint John’s County, Florida announced today that they have completed and successfully tested a fully functional “Newly Innovative Automatic Depth Controller for Peanut Diggers” using a RiteDepth controller manufactured by Greentronics Ltd. Greentronics have been constructing  Height and depth controllers for agricultural crops for several years. The use of the RiteDepth controller has a proven record in many other root crops, but peanuts have been a challenge because of the thick vegetative canopy during harvest. Such a challenge that many others who have been racing to find a solution have not been successful. The breakthrough was made possible after one farmer’s desire to make this system work on his farm. The solution simply proves again that only the farmer can provide the necessary information and  the proper tweaks needed to make applications  work in the field. Kyle Sheffield of Iron City, GA is the farmer who is credited  with the missing link and is the focus of this Press Release.

We expect and are confident that a depth controller will save enough to pay for itself in the first year, based on the model of a farmer with 2000 acres of peanuts. That is an impressive ROI and one that Ag-Tastic is proud to be a part of. Scott Graddy of Ag-Tastic Solutions stated that “Greentronics products have proven time and again that their equipment has one of the best ROIs for my customers. Each time we install one, it is a win – win for us  and the customer. I thoroughly believed  that somehow there was a way to design a RiteDepth controller work for peanuts, but like everyone else, we were looking too hard and complicating things. Kyle’s modification to his KMC digger was the perfect solution.

Full details on how you can get one reserved for your digger, contact Scott Graddy with Ag-Tastic Solutions (904) 201-3509

Debut of the product

Ag-Tastic and Greentronics will have a booth “AB310” at the 2015 SunBelt Expo in Moutlrie GA on Oct. 20-22

About Ag-Tastic Solutions

Ag-Tastic Solutions sells a multitude of Precision Ag technologies. They are a full service and sales company based in St. Augustine, FL. Ag-Tastic is the only Greentronics Dealer south of the Mason Dixon Line.

For more information for obtaining a quote for a kit to compliment your Peanut Digger, contact:

It is a pretty compelling report comparing organic to conventional. There is plenty of data to support both sides of the isle but this report is from a non-profit that was founded in 1947. The report covers 30 years of side by side data.

Of course it does not cover all crops and is based in the north were the ground freezes, but it does present some compelling numbers worth looking at!

Here is a an excerpt from their invite:

I’m reaching out to you today because we’re getting ready to launch a new premium feature, Automatic Activity Recording, which records the work that’s being done on your fields. When you have this feature, the mobile app automatically detects when it enters a field; it then begins gathering information to intelligently determine details about an activity and record it in your system. This allows you to keep more detailed and accurate records without having to spend additional time entering information manually. 

We are really excited to launch Automatic Activity Recording and are likewise eager to get early feedback on it before we share it with all of our customers. If you’re interested in previewing it, we’d love to give you this feature for free for all of 2015; our only request is that you use the app to help us “train” it and then give us your honest feedback about how the feature is performing and how we can improve it for you.

If you’re interested in giving Automatic Activity Recording a try and you have an iPhone or Android phone, please just reply to me and let me know which phone you use. I’ll start working with our engineers to get you set up as soon as possible!

If you are not already a user of their FREE product, please go to FarmLogs and create an account. When you get a confirmation that your account it active, email Heidi (heidi@farmlogs.com) to tell her that Ag-Tastic referred you.

A new potato variety grown for use as a chip should be more marketable because it averts a process that causes the crop to brown, and may be less oily than current tubers, a University of Florida researcher says.

The Elkton potato does not succumb to internal heat necrosis, said Lincoln Zotarelli, a UF assistant horticultural sciences professor and faculty member at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. The disorder is caused by high temperature and changes to soil moisture and nutrients and leaves the potato brown inside.

UF/IFAS and U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists put Elkton potatoes through 19 trials, from 2003-2013, in Florida.  Numerous trials were also conducted in Maine, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, Maryland and Pennsylvania. The trials tested Elkton’s adaptability to soils in the those states and showed the variety exhibits characteristics growers want, said Kathleen Haynes, a research geneticist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Maryland.

The Atlantic is the standard potato chipping variety against which new types are tested in Florida. By those measures, Elkton has better yield, producing more potatoes per acre – a total of 36,800 pounds, or 13 percent more than Atlantic.

It also has an acceptable shape, which in this case is more oval than round, where Atlantic is round, Haynes said. Round is preferable to roundish-oval, but UF/IFAS scientists haven’t heard any industry feedback on the potato’s shape, Zotarelli said.

Elkton, named for an area about 10 miles southwest of St. Augustine, Florida, also will produce potatoes with high solid content, which then yields chips that absorb less oil when they’re fried. Elkton sits in the area where Putnam, St. Johns and Flagler counties converge, where more than half of Florida’s potatoes are grown.

Potatoes are a $136 million-a-year crop in Florida, which ranks 11^th nationally for production of the tuber, according to the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

UF/IFAS scientists work with breeders from the USDA, other universities and industry distributors such as Frito-Lay, Real Potatoes and Simplot to test and select potato varieties for Florida’s growing conditions. Researchers test the latest varieties at UF’s Partnership for Water Agriculture and Community Sustainability in Hastings.

“We test for local adaptability,” Zotarelli said. “It’s a team effort. The initial breeding and selection process is done in Beltsville and in Maine, where most of the seeds come from. We have been selecting the genetic material there, bringing it to Florida, and testing in our conditions.”

Thus far, about five producers in the Elkton area grow its namesake potato, he said.

Results of the Florida trials were published in the June edition of the American Journal of Potato Research.