Reseeding Begins — Killing Off the First Fields with My Upgraded Autosteer

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]We are finally done. Done with an incredibly busy 8 days. Let me catch you up on everything that has happened since we cut our silage last week after I show you this. Poor David didn't even get a seat cover with his new tractor. So instead, he's got a beach babe.

[00:00:21]Wsley tractor sorted out. Get the poor man a seat cover. Anyway, I spotted that earlier on and I just couldn't resist.

[00:00:28]Since I last spoke to you, life has been busy. Silage pit was sealed. All the silage equipment was washed and hooked off. And then I hooked the fertilizer s on. And I got everything done with fertilizer. On Friday and Saturday, we put on 200 kg of can across everything we cut. And we put 100 kg of can on the stuff we still have to cut. So, it got a bit of extra nitrogen. And we plan to probably cut that stuff in the next two or three weeks, which is probably going to end up almost at exactly the same time as the second cut. After we got all of the fertilizer done, we got a nice bit of rain, which is exactly what I had hoped for. And then we started slurry on Monday. We already had quite a number of the fields done with the contractor. He put out around 200,000 gallons. But we have now just finished doing the rest of the fields and I haven't added up yet, but it's probably close to 200,000 gallons again. 12 17 25 47 around 150,000 gallons. There is still about 20 acres of Oh no, I dirtied my good shorts. There is still about 20 acres of silage ground left to cover, but it's over at the out farm. So, it'll be done with a single tanker and my dad can work away at that the rest of the week himself. I asked Wy to get you a seat cover.

[00:01:50]>> He's bringing me on.

[00:01:51]>> It's better than your beach tile.

[00:01:56]>> David says he's already negotiated a seat cover, but we'll leave it in the video anyway. So, basically, in the last 8 days, we cut 150 acres. It has now all got fertilizer again and pretty much all got slurry again. With more rain coming on Thursday, which is tomorrow, and then a pretty wet weekend, it should get all that washed into the ground and get our grass growing again.

[00:02:23]And that means I feel like I finally have some time in my life again.

[00:02:30]I'm not racing to get silage done, fertilizer out.

[00:02:36]or to get some slurry out of these tanks. Oh, this we thing is so annoying.

[00:02:42]And we're going to use that time this week to spray off some more fields for receding, which if it's drier than forecast next week, I'm planning to take into and also to catch up with some weeds because they're starting to appear everywhere. And this is a great opportunity to get them dealt with.

[00:02:59]That's the plan for the rest of this video. But we are also going to be testing out the auto steer system once again. Haven't really touched it since receding last year. So, we're going to make some improvements, write some new code and go and test it.

[00:03:14]I'm going to take this pump out. Then we will go for the cows because I want to show you something pretty interesting.

[00:03:22]And then I'll probably see you on Friday when we will get the steer fitted and get some ground sprayed off and some weeds killed.

[00:03:38]It's crazy how quickly you empty your tanks. A week ago, every tank in this farm was full.

[00:03:45]And now I feel like I've nearly ran out of slurry, right? I need to leave this somewhere smart.

[00:03:54]So yesterday we also managed to get back around our grazing platform. So, this is the field which the cows went out into the very first day. And what I really want to show you is why we graze our cows so early and even when it's really wet, we make the effort and put them out. And it's so that we can catch up on growth. So, the cows are going into really nice covers of grass. Now, it's really high quality. It's pushed our milk yield up to 33 1/2 L, the highest milk yield we've ever had per cow. and by over 1,000 L, the most milk we have ever sold over 2 days. Whenever I posted the video of my cows going out in such wet weather, I actually got quite a few messages from people being like, "You're making a big mistake. Why are you doing that? Just keep them in the house."

[00:04:47]And I'm not saying I was right. But this is when my decision then pays off because my cows are getting high quality grass which means I can cut my feed rate and produce milk where I'm actually generating a profit again despite the bad milk price. Come on.

[00:05:09]Come on.

[00:05:12]I am really looking forward to the next few weeks.

[00:05:16]I have less to do on the farm and it's pretty nice weather for grazing cows. We'll leave Ellie to bring them in in the quad. I'm going to put the fence up, get everything ready for the morning and I will see you all probably on Friday because tomorrow I'm actually not here a lot of the day. Welcome back to Thursday morning. I'm only on the farm until lunchtime. So that gives us about 2 hours to get this tractor ready to go for spraying tomorrow. I've already give it a bit of a wash. I'm now going to clean out the inside again a little bit.

[00:05:49]Get rid of the Coke cans and a random broken lid from a bucket. And then after that, we have to fit the GPS system and change the steering wheel for the auto steer motor, which is going to be a bigger job than you might expect. Since I sold the auto steer motor I was using last year, I have four other motors sitting up there, but none of them have been wired. None of them have been set up. So, that's what I'm going to do this morning. Hopefully, it's pretty straightforward and I can remember all the steps to do it because I think the last motor I set up was like last August.

[00:06:20]There's just so much junk accumulates.

[00:06:25]It's mental.

[00:06:28]There's my saw speaker.

[00:06:30]Wondered where that went.

[00:06:34]There's my magnetic mount as well. I'll definitely need this later.

[00:06:38]Stick it there so I don't lose it.

[00:07:00]I think from memory this is the version 4 motor which is slightly more modern than the ones we were using last year.

[00:07:12]I don't think there's any big differences.

[00:07:17]In fact, it looks exactly the same.

[00:07:22]We have our steering wheel. We have our cables, which we're going to need to put a different connector on. And then we only have one adapter bracket.

[00:07:33]Huh. We definitely need a different adapter bracket.

[00:07:39]A+.

[00:07:41]I think that's the Puma. I'm pretty sure the 6465 is N, which is this one. Let's go test these out before we screw them into the motor.

[00:07:58]Look, we'll do a real deep dive into the Odyssey and how it works and all that sort of fun technically detailed stuff in a separate midweek wedd video at some point. I just dropped the washer. It's going to be hard to get to. How the freak am I getting that?

[00:08:17]Pretty sure it's an N.

[00:08:24]Yeah, it's an N. So, we're just going to skip ahead in this video to me having the auto steer in the tractor set up and working hopefully before lunchtime.

[00:08:36]Well, at least now we know that's the bracket we need. A lot of the tractor brands have different stocks with different threads.

[00:08:43]So, the you have to find the adapter to fit each one. Actually goes on like this.

[00:08:52]Right. I'll see you in hopefully less than an hour. If I'm coming back to you tomorrow morning, things have not went to plan. Things have not quite went to plan. I got the GPS all ready to go and the auto steer all ready to go yesterday and I was going to go spray yesterday evening and just by chance I decided I should probably check the weather forecast before I head to the field. And boy was I glad I checked the weather forecast. It had changed from dry weather to then giving pretty heavy rain. And last night we got some pretty heavy rain. Now, I'm not complaining.

[00:09:23]It's going to do wonders for a second cut silage. Get all that slurry washed in, all of the fertilizer washed in, but it definitely would have ruined all of my work spraying if I hadn't have checked the forecast. So, that's a valuable lesson. If you're going to spray anything, check the forecast.

[00:09:38]Because I wasn't spraying last night, I decided I would spend the time updating the auto steer and making some more improvements. And I think we've actually made pretty big improvements. So this morning, because it is overcast and forecast even more rain, we are going to test the changes to the Odysseier system that I made last night. Check that it's all working. Then I am heading to meet Lynn, the woman who does this merch for me. We've got some new products are going to be added for the springtime, summertime, shorts, t-shirts, a summer collection if you like. So we're going to finalize that now that I've had a chance to choose what I want, know what is actually good. probably going to shout at me cuz I haven't put the price of this thing up yet. I didn't realize how much this was actually costing us wholesale. So, we are making absolutely zero in these, but honestly, they're basically the best product they sell.

[00:10:26]Apart from probably the big hoodies. The big hoodies are better. So, if you want one of these, the perfect garment for cold weather in the morning, but warmer later on in the day, head to the website. I will not put the price up until Sunday evening. Lynn is going to shout at me for that. Then after I finish with Lynn, we're coming back here and we're going to spray the fields off this evening. That's the plan. Hopefully nothing changes that plan. Let's go and get the auto steer updated, fitted to the tractor, and test out the changes I made last night in the real world. To be honest, I'm very confident this time that I've got it. Like, I think this is going to work really, really well. Okay, let me give you a quick indoors demo before we head outside, install it, and give you a proper demonstration. So our steering motor is connected to our GPS over canvas.

[00:11:13]And you can see whenever I turn the wheel, we get a change in the angle of the steering wheel.

[00:11:19]Then if we press this button and then press this to enable it, the steering wheel is now ready to be turned by the commands from the GPS system. And what sends the commands is a pretty complicated algorithm.

[00:11:34]And the algorithm I've changed to is called the Stanley control method. Last year I was using something called pure pursuit or pure pursuit. It's one of the two. I don't know which. So this morning we're going to test the new control system, the Stanley control method. And I am pretty confident it's going to work really well. Some of the things you don't see in my videos are whenever I lose my camera and I spend 20 minutes looking for it and can't find it anywhere. Luckily, I have two cameras just in case that exact thing happens.

[00:12:05]But look what I just found. Sitting right where I left it yesterday. I might as well turn on both cameras. Double shots. Right. Old wheel off, new wheel on.

[00:12:17]Very, very simple process.

[00:12:20]That's our new motor on. Simple as that.

[00:12:23]Now we are going to connect up our cable.

[00:12:28]And that is pretty much everything installed. Sorry about the beeping noise.

[00:12:34]The tractor has an error. It's nothing serious. It's a disconnected sensor.

[00:12:42]But it is going to beep at us for the rest of this video. Right. Let's see if this works.

[00:12:48]This is scary.

[00:12:51]Got everything connected. GPS is loading. Antenna is plugged in. I forgot the 4G modem. We need RTK. Be right back. Oh dear. I'm running out of time as well. There's a good chance we don't actually need RTK.

[00:13:05]So, maybe we try it without it first.

[00:13:07]Just see what happens.

[00:13:10]Right, our motor is connected.

[00:13:13]We'll get our wheels straight, engaging.

[00:13:18]We're going to straighten our zero position.

[00:13:23]And now we're going to record an AB line. And then we'll try and follow the AB line. Simple. Okay, we've got RTK now. So, I guess we're trying it with RTK.

[00:13:36]This is so exciting.

[00:13:39]Oh, I love coding and computers and electronics.

[00:13:44]So, we don't actually have uh fix on RTK yet. So, we're basically it's as if we don't have RTK. So, we still are able to test it with zero corrections.

[00:13:59]Okay, we just got RTK, right?

[00:14:03]We'll test it with a zero corrections at some point. Not today. Let's get onto our guidance line.

[00:14:09]Engage.

[00:14:11]Okay, it's working. 17 cm, 10 cm, 7 cm, 2 cm.

[00:14:19]Don't hit the wall.

[00:14:24]10 cm. This is a curve. How's that going to handle curve? We're overshooting by 60 cm.

[00:14:32]Okay, we need to tighten things up a bit. We need to tighten things up a bit, but we're back now down to 15 31 cm 10 cm.

[00:14:41]Okay, great first start. Great first start. We're now going to do a test down the lean. So, we really have to be accurate if we're going to come back up the lean without going in the hedge. So, we're going to clear a map, basically start again. And we're also going to adjust some of the metrics. So, our overcurren protection, I'm going to try at 0.5.

[00:15:08]And then we're going to also increase our sensitivity to two.

[00:15:15]Okay, let's try that recorded a line first and then we'll come back up to the lean following it. recording. I mean, it's going to be impressive if we go straight through the middle of them gates in the same tracks. It has just rained since I was last chatting to you.

[00:15:31]So, it also means we can probably actually see our tracks. Right, that's good enough. Finish our AB line. Let's turn on paint. We're definitely on our line. And turn on auto steer.

[00:15:43]And let's see how close we get.

[00:15:47]Oh no. Oh, I think the antenna might not be in the middle of the cab cuz we're definitely too close to the side, but we are bang on line. Second. One second. The antenna is definitely wrong.

[00:16:00]We are at 0.

[00:16:02]We are at 2 or 3 cm off.

[00:16:06]Okay, that looks in the center. That's moved us about 40 cm. So, now let's go again.

[00:16:14]Let's turn this back onto the line.

[00:16:19]Let's go a bit faster. See how it handles speed.

[00:16:28]Oh, she's doing well.

[00:16:31]I need to turn up the speed of my steering wheel for sure. Yeah, we're too slow. We're too slow. The steering wheel is too slow. Still not bad.

[00:16:41]Definitely not bad.

[00:16:44]6 cm. 3 cm.

[00:16:52]Oh, that was close. So, why are we snaking? We need to fix this. We need to fix this into our settings and set I don't think we can change our motor speed. It says we can, but I don't think we can. Let's set our Stanley to one. Let's slow it down. Maybe I turned it the wrong way.

[00:17:17]Close.

[00:17:19]Is that better or worse?

[00:17:25]That's better.

[00:17:27]That's better. That's much better. Okay, that's much better.

[00:17:36]So, you can see my tracks. You see the tracks? There's right there. Let's see how close we're going to follow them.

[00:17:42]We are bang on top of them. Like right on top of them. I've got a curve here.

[00:17:47]You can see where I turned.

[00:17:50]Oh, no. I didn't turn. That wasn't me.

[00:17:52]That actually wasn't me. So, there you have it. The test is complete. A great success. I will be back later on today when it finally stops raining and giving showers. We'll get the sprayer hooked on and we will head to the field to burn it off. I've got my spray. I've got my auto steer set up and working. Let's go get the sprayer hooked on and finally head to the field and get some actual ground sprays. These are three fields which we are renting for the first time ever. And they're three fields which have been neglected for quite a long time. The drains were fixed in them earlier on in the year, so they are now going to be receded. It's one of them situations where we're going to take some really bad fields and make them into some really good fields.

[00:18:39]That's the plan at least.

[00:18:42]And of course, we have no balls, no top link, and no top link pin. Basically, everything that could be missing is missing.

[00:18:50]This is always the joys of hooking something on for the first time in a year. And we're missing this pin as well. What? I don't have time for this.

[00:18:59]I'll report back shortly. It is currently 20 to 3. I wanted to get a tank sprayed before milking. If this takes a long time, that is just not going to happen. Right, I've stole bits from everywhere.

[00:19:13]But I should have everything we need to get this hooked on. The pins and the balls are from the topper. I'm going to need them next week. I have another pin which I stole from the link box. And then I'm still short of pin.

[00:19:30]Right, we'll get these on first sake. This is where all my time goes.

[00:19:36]Bingo.

[00:19:38]Let's hope the sprayer still works.

[00:19:41]My link arms are also definitely not even close to level. Let's go level them up as well.

[00:19:48]Of course, the one I need to shorten is tied to the stabilizer and I can't get the knot out. This whole video is going to be me trying to hook on this sprayer. So, let's just fast forward to it being hooked on and filled with spray. We're nearly there, I promise. I've just had to add a little bit of water in the bottom of the tank.

[00:20:06]I'm now going to unfold the booms and we're going to run it just to check that the filters are clean, replace any nozzles or filters if they need replaced and make sure it's going to work properly before we fill it with spray and go and try and spray off 10 acres. I completely forgot I had to do this, which probably means we're going to end up spraying after milking time, but that's okay. Less likelihood of rain.

[00:20:31]Far too close to this meal bin. It should be okay.

[00:20:36]Less likelihood of rain the longer we leave it.

[00:20:41]And spraying in the evening is always better.

[00:20:48]Oh no, the boom is stuck. Freick.

[00:20:56]This is just not my day. I don't want to break it. So, I need to be careful here.

[00:21:04]You have to respect hardy sprayers for being what they are.

[00:21:08]They're cheap. They do the job.

[00:21:12]But some of the design decisions, like after years of making them, you think you'd sort it out.

[00:21:21]Oh, no.

[00:21:26]There we go. There we go.

[00:21:30]Got there in the end. Bit more tea and oil.

[00:21:36]I could loosen off the spring or I could just ignore it and hope it goes away. I know what I'm choosing. Let's run the water through it, then clean out our filters. Then we're finally ready to go to the field. I think all the nozzles are good.

[00:21:50]Yeah, they all look fine, actually. Now I have to clean these filters. They're actually not too bad, but since I'm not going to get away now until later on, I might as well do the job properly.

[00:22:13]That is an instant big improvement. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10.

[00:22:51]So to kill off our field, we're using a product called Ovation. I actually didn't get a price for it. I probably should have, but basically it's the cheap version of Roundup. And from memory, I think it's six lers a hectare of actual product, which is a pretty heavy dose, but it is to destroy some permanent grassland. Grassland, which probably hasn't been receded in about 50 years.

[00:23:18]And it also has to take out some rushes.

[00:23:21]Let's see, where is it? Permanent grassland destruction. Permanent pasture. 6 L a hectare in 150 to 250 L of water. Oh heck. We need a lot of this stuff. No, that's 20 L of product. That was the confusion. So if we say 5 L a hectare for easy counting and then 250 L of water. So we can do four hectares with one sprayer full. And I'm pretty sure we have around four hectares in total to destroy. I did buy a spare drum just in case I'm a little bit short, but I should be able to make one sprayer full do it. I think I don't actually know what size these wheels are. If this hose slips, I am getting soaked.

[00:24:10]By the way, I'm closing my eyes, so I'm using safety precautions.

[00:24:21]It's currently quarter 3. I maybe could get it sprayed before milking, but I think I'm going to wait. The clouds are still looking pretty ominous. And according to the forecast, there is a 0% chance of rain at 5:00. Whereas at the minute, there's a 40% chance of rain.

[00:24:37]Once again, we will delay what we're going to do. and I will see you in about an hour and a half when we will finally head to the field and see if my tractor can drive itself. I really hope it works. So, this video is going to be the ultimate anti-limax. And we are finally heading for the field. Evan's working. I have RTK. The Odysseier's connected. The sprayer's full.

[00:25:02]The weather looks pretty dodgy to be honest, but the forecast says it's not going to rain.

[00:25:10]So, I'm going to trust that over the dark clouds. I feel like that's a mistake, but I have no other choice. It honestly says 0% chance rain. Oh, I really hope this works.

[00:25:26]There is a heck of a lot of work behind what you're about to see. like I mean hundreds of hours and genuine years of work to get to this point. And one of the really nice things about if this does work is that the very first attempt at Odyssey I made probably six or seven years ago was me trying to implement the Stanley control method. And I read so much about it, watched videos about it, done a heck of a lot of research, and just could not get it to work properly.

[00:26:08]And now we fast forward 6 years, and it's a single line typed in a terminal, and Claude Code written the whole thing for me.

[00:26:21]Done everything. It's just phenomenal.

[00:26:27]It is costing me 90 a month for quad code, but it is the most incredible AI model I have ever used and the rate of improvement is just crazy.

[00:26:44]Anyway, I'm not saying it's crazy as too much because we haven't actually seen how well it works in the field yet. So, I'll see you when we get there.

[00:26:54]We'll start with the squarest field and then we're going to work in these two little tiny squiggly fields which are going to be a real challenge for autophere. But worst case I can just go back to the normal GPS. So we're not going to be stuck. I also don't have these fields mapped but I'm not going to do that today. I can do that someday. I have more time. Okay. So the plan is we're going to do round the headland once without guidance. I could map the field to be honest. No, we're not. I'll do it properly someday. Oh, we're too high. Oh, goodness.

[00:27:31]Okay, we are spraying.

[00:27:35]So, I have never sprayed these fields before. I've never been in these fields before. This is quite a new experience.

[00:27:41]But I think the far hedge is going to be where we're going to record our AV line.

[00:27:45]Oh no. Teleopole.

[00:27:49]The far hedge will record our AV line.

[00:27:52]And then that's what we will use for the auto steer. Should I record a totally straight line? I probably should.

[00:28:01]Yeah, let's do a totally straight line to start with. And then in the other fields, we can try doing curved lines and see how far off that makes us.

[00:28:12]What am I set to? I'm set to fertilizer at 24 m. No, spraying at 10 m.

[00:28:21]Okay, good. Okay, let's just go for it.

[00:28:24]Screw the messing about. We're on to our first line.

[00:28:33]It's a wee bit slow to correct this.

[00:28:37]It's a wee bit slow, but we'll see. We'll go back down the other way and see if it's if we need to turn it up a wee bit. We're coming up to our guidance line again. We're going to bop the button. Auto steer's engaged.

[00:28:55]Bang on line. Don't have to do anything.

[00:29:01]I mean, I am very impressed of myself.

[00:29:06]Okay, so that is the first field done. I probably need to get a thumbnail. That's always the hardest part of every video.

[00:29:12]Okay, that's a good thumbnail. Let's take that photo.

[00:29:31]You can maybe see our tracks on the camera, but they're really not bad. I'll take that all day long.

[00:29:41]We're not quite there just yet. Curves and speed definitely need some work, but the plan is to fit an auto steer into the Puma and the EDS in the next few days so that I will be testing this in every single tractor. When I go to mow, I'll be using auto steer. When I'm power harrowing, I'll be using auto steer. And I also have bought myself a new laptop and a Starlink Mini, which gives me a really fast internet connection in the tractor.

[00:30:10]So that number one I can live stream silage but also I can code and take changes to the auto steer in real time. Okay, this is the last we bit of the second field and that will be my sprayer empty.

[00:30:25]I might go around and pick up few of the we bits I missed from my wiggly auto steer lines before I adjusted the sensitivity. Engage again. See if it turns on to the line. That is a challenging one.

[00:30:38]Returning. Returning.

[00:30:41]Perfect.

[00:30:43]Got it. Perfect. We're heading to them bits over there that we missed.

[00:30:48]My first attempt at following the curve really did not go very well. I did promise you all a very quick explanation as to how the auto steer is working. And in the simplest possible terms, it works out how far away we are from the line we want to follow. It uses the rate of change. So, how fast are we approaching the line? Plus a K factor, which is the value we were changing in the cab to set an angle to steer towards the line. So, if you're far away from the line and you're approaching very slowly, it gives you more steering angle. If you're close to the line and you're approaching very fast, it'll give you less steering angle. That's what the Stanley control method basically does.

[00:31:27]And it seems to be working really, really well. So, good job, Claude Code.

[00:31:32]Although to be fair, I also had it written at 1.2. Just didn't work. But we'll ignore that part. The two really big challenges for getting this to work really well are that I am computing my heading from the GPS position, not from an IMU and a compass, and I am also trying to work out the wheel angle without having a wheel angle sensor. I just want it to be something which is really quick and easy to install. I don't want to have to start mounting stuff on your tractor, running cables out of your cab, just it's more stuff to break.

[00:32:12]So, the idea behind the Odysseier system that I'm developing is that it's going to do these kind of jobs, spraying, fertilizer, mowing well enough. It might not get you the 2 or 3 cm of a Green Star system which has got all of the information possible being fed into it from the tractor all hooked together. It knows exactly the angle of the wheels at all times. It's not meant to be that. It's meant to be it follows the line better than you could manage at a really sensible price and it doesn't take you two days to install it. That's going to have to do us for this week. I was hoping to get that last field spray this evening as well, but it's currently 5 6 on a Friday evening. My wife is going away at quarter to 7 and if I'm late, she is going to kill me. The meeting with Lynn at lunchtime went really well. I'm excited to show you all the stuff that we're going to be putting on the website for the summer collection. If you do want to get any of the stuff that's currently up there, please do go check it out. Lynn really enjoys the stress of being busy fulfilling orders. And genuinely the stuff is really, really good quality.

[00:33:20]You shall not believe me when I say this, but I make next to nothing out of this. The prices are set at a level where Lynn does okay out of it. But more importantly, all of you actually get some really genuinely good quality, useful products. The windbreaker that you might have seen me wearing earlier in this video, the like lightweight rain jacket, incredible. Honestly, all that's left for me to do this week is to say a massive thank you once again for watching. Any comments, stick them down below. I do read every single one of them. And a like and a subscribe is always going to be appreciated. I'll see you next week when we will hopefully be plowing the fields that we just sprayed off in a desperate attempt to get them receded before we start back into silage in probably as little as two weeks time.

[00:34:04]Farming just never stops, does