I planted corn the first time when I was 10 years old. My dad did the same thing. He planted corn when he was 10, and I had an uncle that started planting corn when he was 9 years old. The year he died, he was 82 years old. He had planted 72 consecutive crops on his own family land. And that's very unusual because there's too many people that are afraid to let the younger generation get a hold of something and do it the way it maybe should be done or could be done.
Seeing a lot of change. We're planting corn today. We're still on our corn rotation. We do beans about every 3 years. So this is a smaller planter. It's a 12-row because this farm has a lot of little fields, so it lends itself better for the smaller fields and getting around. But it's a 5900.
I think we think a lot more like a farmer, and of course I'm out here planting corn now on some of our own acres. When's the last time you've seen the president of any of those other companies out operating a corn planter or a grain cart? And I make it a point of staying involved in farming enough that I actually get that experience yet today. And that's the difference — I think you have to have somebody that's really involved in it and sees what's going on and builds something that they need, not just something that they think they need.
One of Kinze's core values is customer focus. That's one of the founding principles my dad started the company on. And so we're constantly getting farmer feedback on what we can do better and what we can improve and what we can make easier to use and just more productive in general. So these intrainers would be an example of farmer feedback that we took and received, and engineering has done a redesign of our intrainers. The intrainers are the black devices that go underneath the bulk tanks and they distribute the seed every row. The vac hoses hook into the intrainer.
So what's different about this intrainer? They've changed some of the geometry of it for better cleanout for our bulk tanks. And that was some feedback we got from some of our farmer customers. And so we worked hard at really making great improvements to that. And these intrainers were kind of the last step of that process.
These intrainers are made, you know, obviously to support all the different row widths of planters we have. So if you're using a 12-row planter, you're not using all the ports on it. So by putting wedges in there to close those down, it keeps the seed out of there and then you don't have to deal with that from a cleanout standpoint. And then there's little doors that open up in sections underneath that intrainer. You know, if you get seed or something plugged, you can open up and drain the seed out. They've changed the way those little doors latch and open and they're a lot more ergonomic and friendly to use and they latch up better.
And next spring these will be on our production planters for model year 26. So they've been heavily tested. You know, I'm not the first to test it. I'm not an experimental, like first-use prototype, as we would say — engineering does that initially. So basically in this case they're just using this planter to put some acres on it and make sure, again, just continuously test and make sure everything is as we think, so it's ready to go for production.
What we're doing here is running a planter with all of the vacuum and the high speed and all the needs of vacuum and hydraulics, and we're running it off of the tractor entirely. And for a long time we had to sell a hydraulic power takeoff hydraulic pump to keep up with that demand. And so that's been the mindset more recently. But now we're getting these tractors that have more hydraulic capacity. And so we've got a couple of them out here that are running a couple of big planters that we thought all along we had to have the big power takeoff pump, but if we can run off the tractor's hydraulic system, that saves some expense.
So yesterday I came to start up the 12-row here on this farm in the Johnson County, Iowa City area that we have. When I got in it and made the first pass, I had row 11 here flashing red that it wasn't planting seed after I went about 20 feet. You know, I got out and pulled the cover off the meter and there was no seed on the disc, so the meter wasn't getting seed. And then I tried to put my hand on the end of the back hose to see if the seeds were clogged and we could free it up. As I looked at stuff, it was getting beyond my basic troubleshooting skills. So one of our engineers came out and he was kind of befuddled, worked with it for a while, and so we took the tractor to the shed and emptied the seed out of the one bulk tank. And so we knew it was that end of the intrainer. So we emptied the seed on the opposite end of the intrainer for that tank and then emptied out the side that was problematic.
So kind of as a last resort, one of the guys took a flashlight and shined it inside the intrainer there. And a few minutes later he said, 'Huh, why is there a piece of paper in here that says intrainer on it?' And of course that made everybody scurry to go take a look. And so there was definitely something in there. And then we had to take the intrainer off of the bulk tank and open it up. And we found there were three pieces of 8½ by 11 paper in there. So we pulled the three pieces of paper out and put everything back together and everything's working great.
Blue Vantage is always getting more features and options and improvements, and again that's based on farmer feedback and what features they'd like to see. And one of the features that is new for this year is an auto replant, where you can set the threshold there — that's set for less than 70%. So like yesterday when we had the one row around the end of the field that we were troubleshooting and trying to fix, then I could go back over that pass and then it knew to go ahead and replant because that row was missing.
This is the split-screen feature that is new on Blue Vantage. And so basically either side here you can pick what you want to see. Over here we're on simulation. Over here we're on applied force because we have downforce on this planter. So you can see that. So very versatile and flexible.
Oh, we're still built here in the Midwest. In fact, we're located about as central as you can get when it comes to the corn belt, and right on Interstate 80 where you can go east-west. When the reputation was — they called it the Japan company, a lot of things come from Japan years ago and it had a bad reputation for quality. Now we don't think too much about it, but now it's Mexico and it's Canada and it's China building a lot of these things. And why should we send that work out of the country when we can do it right here and probably do it better?
