Saying agriculture research work is as expensive as regular farming, researchers and agronomists at North Dakota State University’s North Central Research Extension Center modify the equipment such as planters and combines at the center to fit their needs.

“The state government does supply funding for the research center and they do supply a small amount of funding for equipment, but it’s small. It’s not very big. It’s not enough but it helps,” said Eric Eriksmoen, research agronomist at the research center.

“Small-scale equipments are as expensive as the big ones, they cost around $200,000 to $300,000,” Eriksmoen said. “So, research is very expensive, just like regular farming.”

A lot of the implements such as planters, and the combines at the center are modified and fabricated in order to meet the needs of the center. And the center wishes to buy new ones with better capabilities but money is a big obstacle. So, buying used equipment or modifying the planters and combines or renting them from somewhere are some of the methods that the center has been using the last several years.

“A lot of our implements are modified or we have built, and fabricated them here,” said Shana Pederson, Area Extension Specialist.

“We hope to update our equipments, especially row crops planters, so we can more effectively distribute the seeds,” Pederson said. “We want to have our planters more precise like the producers have. For example, producers can have a seed every four inches. We don’t have that.”

“We are hoping to have that maybe in the future. We have a couple of combines but some of them are fairly old. One of them is as old as 20 years,” she added.

Three years ago, the center bought a used combine for $100,000 and modified it to make it work in a way that the center wanted to, and a new small scale planter is being modified to make it capable of using different rows for seeding. As of now, most of them have only two row seeding capacity.