Allows upgrades of older machinery for smaller farms
Topcon’s has created a Value Line Steering solution for farmers using mid-range tractors on small- to medium-sized farms. It makes autosteering technology — typically used on larger machinery — accessible to a broader range of farmers. Farmers with older or smaller machinery, or small specialty farms, can boost the value of their machinery with the autosteering technology. The integrated system is designed to work across a wide range of applications, machinery and brands. It includes compliance with ISOBUS-UT to offer universal compatibility and ease of use. The package includes a GNSS receiver, electric steering wheel controller, touchscreen console and Horizon Lite software, compatible with front-wheel-steer tractors. Farmers can add local, satellite or RTK correction services such as Topcon’s Topnet Live for enhanced precision.
While GPS technology originally started as a product of the space race, it has transformed in recent decades to be used in a variety of different industries. Its positioning and navigation capabilities make many everyday tasks easier to achieve. One industry that has continuously benefitted from this technology is agriculture.
The world’s population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion people by 2050, effectively increasing global food demand by 50%, according to the United Nations. To meet these demands, global agricultural productivity will need to increase by 1.75% a year.
Currently, productivity is only growing at an average rate of 1.63%, according to the Global Harvest Initiative. Precision agriculture and advanced technologies, such as automation, computer vision, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are already on the farm helping farmers meet this demand, and GPS technology plays an especially significant and transformative role in making this happen.
Game-Changer
The development of automated driving and self-driving tractors has changed the game for farming by allowing technology to drive the machines with great accuracy, while farmers focus on other value-added tasks.
Over time, that technology further developed in conjunction with other technology on the farm, such as GPS. Having a reliable way to keep equipment from running over crops is incredibly important to farmers.
The GPS technology we use at John Deere is accurate within centimeters and complements the computer vision and sensors within the tractors with precise positioning in the field. This allows the farmer to drive faster without running over and damaging the crop. It also means farmers no longer cover the same ground twice.
Other technology has also been installed on farming machines to provide added value, especially when paired with GPS. When used alongside sensors, GPS offers the potential to enable real-time data collection. Sensors throughout the field let farmers know things such as where each seed was planted or environmental conditions while spraying nutrients on their crops.
Historical data from the farmer and garnered through the technology are turned into maps that, when combined with real-time information from the sensors, enable farmers to have even more accurate and precise information about what is happening next in the field, to ultimately optimize operations. This is critical as almost every job that gets done on the farm has to be completed in short time windows.
Spatial intelligence provides a more vivid representation of what is happening in the field at all times so the farmer can make real-time decisions and plan for the future.
Tasks such as tilling, planting, spraying and harvesting are easier when farmers have a more precise way to track their position. GPS technology, working in conjunction with computer vision cameras and sensors, allows crops to be distributed more evenly across a field and enables seeds to be planted at exactly the correct spacing and position to maximize yield.
All of these tasks boost productivity and sustainability on the farm by providing farmers with the data to make informed, sustainable decisions.
Photo: John Deere
Machines Talking to Each Other
Technology on farms has evolved to the point where machines can wirelessly communicate to each other in the field. This concept, known as machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, is also linked closely to GPS technology. Enabling machines to know where in the field another machine is and what work it has done in real time means the machines work as a team to get the job done in the most efficient way possible with no overlap. Coordination among machines helps farmers avoid redundant effort and the overuse of valuable inputs, which allows for more efficient use of resources and unlocks the potential of automation.
As the agriculture community continues to work to meet the rising demands for food, fuel and fiber, GPS technology will play a key role to help farmers make more food more efficiently, sustainably and with greater consistency in results. This not only benefits the farmer’s business, but it impacts every single person in the world.
Al Savage is the StarFire Network manager at John Deere.
Airbus Defence and Space and The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of Bayer, have announced a global agreement to deliver frequently updated satellite imagery from Airbus to farmers through Climate FieldView, a digital agriculture platform.
Farmers who use Climate FieldView can access high-resolution data of their fields from the Airbus SPOT 6, SPOT 7 and Pléiades satellites throughout the growing season. This gives FieldView customers the ability to more precisely monitor crop health and performance, helping them take action in the field before yield is impacted at the end of the season.
They will also be able to visualize this satellite imagery alongside other data layers in their FieldView account, including planting and yield data, to unlock new insights about crop health.
The large swath and coverage capabilities of the SPOT satellites enable mapping at a national level down to individual farmland parcels, while the Pléiades satellites can be used to pinpoint details in specific areas, thanks to its combination of sub-meter resolution and multispectral bands.
The complementarity between SPOT and Pléiades resolutions, swaths and revisits is crucial for effectively monitoring crops more precisely and helps enable more-informed decision-making.
“We are very pleased to be working with The Climate Corporation to enhance FieldView by providing them with access to updated, cloud-free images within the time frame required to efficiently monitor crops at each key growth stage,” said François Lombard, head of Intelligence Business at Airbus Defence and Space.
“High-quality satellite imagery integrated into a farmer’s Climate FieldView account can bring in more consistent and invaluable field-level insights,” said Steven Ward, Senior Director of Geospatial and Weather Sciences at The Climate Corporation. “This partnership with Airbus supports Climate’s commitment to deliver the most robust imagery ecosystem on the farm, helping farmers make important decisions tailored precisely to their individual fields.”
The Climate Corporation’s mission is to help the world’s farmers sustainably increase their productivity through the use of digital tools. First launched in the United States in 2015, the company’s Climate FieldView platform gives farmers a deeper understanding of their fields so they can make more informed operating decisions to optimize yields, maximize efficiency and reduce risk.
FieldView is currently on more than 60 million paid acres across the United States, Canada, Brazil and Europe.
As technology continues to march forward, and storage and data evaluation use grows, the surveyor and the farmer will begin to use each other’s skillsets to increase their own productivity. So how do we get there? First, we must establish how each side uses their prospective GPS tools.
As a child, I spent several summer vacations at my relatives’ farms in central Illinois. My early impression of working on a farm was one of long hours and hard work. Work and chores completed by my family members was very physical with no set hours to look forward to. My uncles didn’t get to set the schedules for rain and sun and had no say in whether or not a piece of equipment would break down.
What I encountered as a child taught me that there was no technology in farming; it was nothing but hard work. The thought of using something as high-tech as GPS would have made most old-time farmers laugh you right out of the coffee shop.
My career as a land surveyor has had its share of hard work at times, but it has been the technology that has always fascinated me. When I began as a rodman, the electronic distance meter allowed surveyors to measure distances more than a mile instead of hand taping the entire way, and with much more accuracy. Along the way, I’ve watched computer technology grow, with total stations that incorporate cameras and video and GPS receivers that provide accurate locations instantaneously.
That brings us to our modern-day crossroads. As surveyors, we are constantly trying to find ways to incorporate our skills into other occupations to increase productivity. We also see the modern farmer moving away from small family operations with only several hundred acres, morphing into farm management corporations with tens of thousands of acres as well as millions of dollars of equipment.
Efficiency is what they are after, and they are spending significant amounts of money on technology to make it happen. My own curiosity and research has opened my eyes to how far the farming profession has grown, and in many ways surpassed the land surveyor with technology. But I think there is still common ground that needs to be explored, so let’s start at the root of each profession.
The Farmer and the Surveyor
As different as the two professions may seem, farming and surveying have one large common link: data. More specifically, the tools, methods and procedures they operate to acquire the data used in their everyday jobs and projects.
The implementation of GPS equipment and the ability to collect location data has greatly improved the productivity of both professions, but for drastically different reasons. However, as technology continues to march forward, and storage and data evaluation use grows, the surveyor and the farmer will begin to use each other’s skillsets to increase their own usefulness.
So, how do we get there? First, we must establish how each side uses their respective GPS tools.
The Land Surveyor
The land surveyor and his or her staff use GPS daily, with varying degrees of accuracy. Here are a few examples:
Mapping-Grade GPS Device (>= 3 meters)
This handheld unit is primarily used for mapping utilities and improvements that don’t require high accuracy. The data and attributes acquired by this unit will be inserted into geographic information system (GIS) databases for inventory, and maintenance logs for future review and upgrade needs. Surveyors use these units for mapping items that require additional attributes and information necessary to improve the overall usefulness of a GIS database.
Differential GPS (<= 1 meter)
Differential GPS provides live positional solutions for applications that require more accuracy than mapping-grade GPS, at a reasonable equipment and operational price. These systems are used by aeronautical companies for mapping assistance, logistics companies for asset tracking, and emergency operations for 911 systems. These systems are also used by hydrographic surveyors for use in mapping lake and river bottoms as well as surveyors working in open pit mines, producing existing condition maps and volumetric surveys.
Survey-Grade GPS
Surveyors began implementing GPS equipment into their measuring repertoire in the mid 1980s with the introduction of data collection by static methods. This technique allowed for long-distance measurements with good accuracy and precision, but it came at an incredibly expensive cost.
By the mid 1990s, real-time kinematic (RTK) equipment was introduced, and gave the land surveyor a new gateway into long-distance measurement with shorter occupation time and less cost. Additional enhancements to RTK systems included on-the-fly initialization, increased data-collector capability, and cellular/long-distance radio networks.
These improvements allowed increased data-collection productivity, including mobile collection on all-terrain and survey vehicles. A topographic survey of a 40-acre parcel that would take several days of walking now is completed in less than 6 hours on an ATV. Boundary retracements of large parcels that used to take weeks of traversing the perimeter can now be done in a few days.
Many credit GPS technology and functionality for greatly improving land surveying production as well as increasing accuracy and precision of the work.
Farming has been passed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years. History tells us this has been a hard life for many of these families as manual labor was at the root of the occupation. Livestock and family members were used to pull the necessary implements for planting each year’s crop, with most harvesting being done by hand.
The Industrial Revolution brought the tractor and planting and harvesting equipment. After World War II, equipment manufacturers retooled their factories to increase the size and capacity of tractors. Even with the reduced manual labor that a farm tractor allowed, it was still a physical burden on the farmer planting crops and driving the miles of rows necessary to plant fields.
Also, many agricultural areas became more organized, with local farm bureaus and associations being formed to help the farmer. These organizations provided information on how to increase yields in their crops; this data became the basic form of a GIS database for soils and drainage mapping well before digital mapping. These databases provided the initiative for the farmer to analyze planting methods and rates; herbicide, pesticide and fertilizer applications; and to review crop yields for notable increases and deficiencies.
In the 1980s, yield monitoring equipment became a new tool for the forward-thinking farmer to invest in, analyzing how well his crops were producing. The only negative was the inability to accurately map the location of the various yield rates that would occur in the harvest. The farmer was forced to spend more time reading the yield analyzations in smaller parts of his fields in order to identify where adjustments were needed for increasing the output. Many farmers didn’t see the return on investment for this system, and those who did purchase such a system soon gave up.
In the early 1990s, Rockwell International debuted the Vision System, a GPS unit using a U.S. Coast Guard correction system paired with a yield monitoring unit to map the location of yield rates during field operations. Trimble, John Deere and others were soon developing their own systems. All of these systems were expensive, delicate and too complex for most farmers to justify installing in their tractors.
However, new discoveries in GPS technology during the late 1990s brought sweeping changes to this new tool for the farmer. While the term “precision agriculture” had floated around for a while, it wasn’t until the introduction of high-accuracy GPS that the statement reflected correctly on the industry.
Differential GPS (<= 1 meter)
John Deere began its pursuit of GPS technology in the early 1990s along with many others, but the company’s decision to continue pursuing this competitive edge is what led to several advancements for the farming industry. Deere’s work with Stanford University and NASA led to the revision of differential corrections for GPS locations to gain additional accuracy for a guidance system for Deere equipment.
By 1998, John Deere presented a differential GPS system that provided 1-2 meter accuracy to assist farmers with smaller tolerances of precision field planting and harvesting. Innovations such as this led to many more advancements in the farming industry.
Real-Time Kinematic (<= 2.5 centimeters)
Today’s precision farming is more accurate than ever, with RTK networks providing a bulk of the coverage necessary to supply the farmer with corrections. In places where a local correction provider is not available, the farmer has choices of setting up his own base for correction or subscribing to other real-time networks via cellphone coverage. These systems allow for highly accurate mapping and guidance systems so the farmer has more control and information on his field and crops than ever before. Farmers now using GPS control in precise methods have more tools for increasing yields and production, including crop planning, soil sampling, pesticide/herbicide/fertilizer application and harvest analyzation.
Crop planning used to be strictly in the hands of the farmer who drove his tractor in his field in an effort to follow the lay of the land. Today’s farmer uses topographic maps, aerial photography and mapping software to create planting patterns that make farming more efficient. By maximizing the planting configuration, this is also an opportunity to minimize fuel consumption. Soil sampling and weed mapping are now staples of many farmers’ activities.
The farmer uses these methods to reduce the number of contaminants within the crop. He can also analyze the field’s health in order to apply the appropriate amount of necessary chemicals. These procedures are now computer controlled to vary the rate of application depending on the location within the field.
Harvest analyzation has become the biggest source of data collected. Yield monitoring equipment was the first tool introduced into the electronic farming age. Now, coupled with GPS mapping of yield rates and volumes, farmers can accurately predict spot, regional and overall crop production from their fields. This data, along with soil mapping, is reviewed after the harvest and is used to determine a strategic plan for the next year’s planting.
The biggest improvement, in most farmers’ opinions, is the implementation of steering-guidance systems. Initially produced to be strictly a guide to the driver, systems are now automated into the steering system to follow a predetermined path within a 1-inch tolerance. This frees the driver to monitor planting, spray application and harvesting operations.
By turning the driving over to an automated system, field row overlap is reduced by up to 30 percent. This decreases double coverage of seed and spray application and it minimizes fuel consumption. This system also allows for less driver fatigue with the ability to work around the clock as needed or conditions dictate. Coupling this steering system with variable rate planters and sprayers, the farmer has a system that allows him to be more effective in managing and monitoring operations.
Bringing the Two Occupations Together
Both of these noble professions are using a highly accurate form of measurement and data recording, but we must review further how they can help each other. To do that, we must analyze what each is doing with the technology.
Surveyors and GPS Use
Roles of the surveyor are to measure land, provide his professional knowledge regarding parcel boundaries, and collect data for engineering and drainage purposes. A majority of this data is now collected by GPS methods and is in NAD83 state plane coordinates with NAVD88 elevations. This information can be supplemented by county and state GIS data as well. Surveyors also have knowledge of existing monuments by local, state and federal authorities tied to these coordinate systems/datums so all future surveys can be related to each other geographically.
Farmers and GPS Use
Farmers who have embraced GPS technology now have the power not only to map and collect data, but to also utilize previous data for crop efficiency. This ability to run a more efficient farming system is happening now for many farmers. The farmer is educated in regard to seed germination, weed and bug prevention, and maximizing crop yields so collecting this data has become a necessary task.
The Farmer and the Surveyor — Harvesting Data
The farmer and the surveyor can use their knowledge in many ways for the mutual benefit of increasing crop yields, efficiently working the land, and maximizing production.
The surveyor’s knowledge of topography and drainage can assist the farmer with shaping of land to minimize water runoff and loss of key nutrients in the soil. This loss is estimated to be an average of two to three tons of soil per acre per year. Installation of drainage tile in addition to grading can be a critical part of minimizing soil loss, and the surveyor can help with this analysis.
Accurate boundaries allow the farmer to know the limits of his property. The surveyor can provide this information so the farmer can maximize his planting configuration, yet not encroach on the adjacent property. The surveyor can also help with the creation of land-management systems to help farmland owners plan for financial decisions and tax strategies.
The biggest opportunity for the surveyor is to offer assistance to the farmer who has little or no knowledge of data collection. This geospatial data can be confusing to those not familiar with this information. Farmers who become educated in analyzing and reading crop data can increase production and yields.
Surveyors have the math skills and background to assist with the management of the data from a location standpoint. This effort will help the farmer know soil conditions, germination, spray application and harvesting to maximize the cost effectiveness of his investment in the land.
Together, the farmer and the surveyor can create a successful partnership that can increase crop production worldwide. Data is the crop that brings them together, and planted with the right amount of care and nurturing, this data can become more valuable than ever.
