Farm Progress Show offers the latest farm tech

BOONE, Iowa — The Farm Progress Show opened it’s 2024 run at the Central Iowa Expo Grounds near Boone. Six hundred exhibits are on 100 acres, drawing people from 48 states and 50 countries.

The show includes combine and tillage demonstrations at the fields located right on the show grounds. One new technology being displayed are drones applying chemicals and seed.

James Harris was flying a drone and demonstrating adding chemicals and batteries when the craft was on the ground.

“You get about an acre a minute so inside 10 minutes you’re depleting your tank your battery coming back and changing everything over,” said Harris, from Alabama. “If you have an efficient set up, you can get back online again in about a minute and a half.”

Another display was a simulator for driving a giant AGCO sprayer.

“This is a rotator sprayer, simulator of a rotator since we can’t have a traditional ride and drive,” said Aejah Van Dyke, of AGCO. “This allows people to have kind of a feel for how to drive one.”

This week has been a hot one so far, and the Farm Progress Show has an aggressive plan for all kinds of weather.

“If we have lightning within 8 miles we have a response that we activate, if we have wind over 40 miles an hour, we have a response we activate,” said Matt Jungmann, Farm Progress Show Manager. “If you are going to have an event in Iowa at the end of August you need to be prepared to handle the heat. There’s plenty of shade tents, there’s over 20 structures here on the grounds that are air conditioned so people can get out of the heat a little bit.”

Jungmann said there are free hydration stations around the show grounds.

The first day of the show was hot, but late afternoon showers offered cool relief as many attendees were leaving the show.

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