My rows overlap and I'm wasting seed, fertiliser and fuel
First go and measure it, because almost nobody has. Drive a pass, come back on the next, and put a tape on the seam. An honest operator steering by eye runs 4 to 8 inches, which on a 10 ft implement is 5 to 10 percent of every acre worked twice. Then price that against what fixing it costs — on hay ground it may genuinely not be worth it, and on row crop it usually is.
What actually works
Takes pass-to-pass overlap from 4–8 inches to under one. The recoverable share is the difference, not the whole overlap — RTK still costs you about an inch.
$1,000–1,300 in partsYour real overlap decides the whole economic case, and the default everyone quotes is somebody else's. A tape costs nothing and the number is yours in ten minutes.
Overlap is the half of the problem you can measure in the spring. Skips you find when the crop is up and the gap is grinning at you, and they cost more per square foot than the overlap does.
Run the numbers
- What your overlap actually costs → — free calculator, works offline.
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