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GPS Meets Agriculture for Precision Farming
mskfisher writes "NASA Science News is reporting a story on a NASA project called Ag20/20, which involves farmers using GPS-aided crop and field analysis to improve accuracy and yields.
Instead of blanketing the whole area with a set level of pesticide or fertilizer, they can now vary it via computer, based on IR and soil data gathered from aircraft, satellites, and tractor-mounted sensors."
Satisfied, he'll glance around his burgeoning field. "But wait," he wonders, suddenly puzzled, "where did my dog go?" Fingers snap. "I must've forgot his GPS collar again!"
That's not the farmer's problem; he's just behind the times.
A real precision farmer would have an AIBO.
"The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for 'entrepeneur'." -George W. Bush
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I saw a tracktor in minnesota about 5 years ago that had gps and made a nice map of the field after going trhough it. ------- http://loudpc.com?rid=cssla Use your outlook remotely, just like blackberry but affordable!!!
Farming for silver?
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They've been doing this sort of thing for YEARS now.
Will this improve the quality of crop circles?
"We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it" -- Winston Churchill
Apparently some people can't make the effort to say the whole word.
This is hardly original. A simple google search and one of the more interesting results here
From the article:
Indeed, perhaps only a decade or so hence, Isbell will climb down from his tractor holding a palm-sized computer in direct contact with Earth orbiting satellites.
John Deere is already selling GPS-receiver equipped tractors (marketed as "StarFire receivers") that look about the size of a palm.
The future isn't what it used to be.
Well, so much for sneaking to the barn with the Farmer's daughter... :)
the fact that satelite usage is now cheap enough to make this cost effective.
/., this is the one that makes me most optimistic about the space program.
We complain that space is not being pushed enough, and THIS is what will make people invest in NASA's technology. Whenever the demand exists for a product, the market finds a way to deliver it as cheaply as possible, in order to maximize profit margins. This is the technology that will enable the space industry to bring the cost per pound of lifting stuff down.
Of all of the space stories in the past year that I have seen on
The only part that worries me is that there are not enough satelites to fill current demand, so planes are being used instead as the inferior alternative.
"Satellite images, which require more time to downlink and process, can take from 2 to 7 days to reach a farmer.
Such delays won't be a problem forever, though. 'Technology is advancing quickly and more of these commercial satellites are being launched each year,' he added."
I'm a concientious
The lumber companies in Canada have been using GIS to better map their harvesting. They also have reduced the impact by being able to better utilize the mesh of old bush roads. Plus they get a better idea of the size and age of trees by looking at IR images.
GIS has also been used on farming with large farms - a farmer couldn't possibly monitor 1000's of hectres.
Check the Faculty of Environmental Studies page at the University of Waterloo. They have all kinds of cool uses for GIS - sea ice studies are pretty interesting.
I am going to hell and I am going to take all of you with me.
The future is here. We never saw it coming because we are riding it. Imagine targeted pesticide control and fertilization. Cost savings and environmental impacts would be outstanding! Now if we can just convince farmers to fork out the $$$
'mmmmmmmmm.... forbidden donut'
Just another example of the man keeping the farmer down. First its GPS. Then its fences around the field. Next comes the little collars that were in that prison movie with Rutger Hauer that we can trigger to blow from space.
While we are on that space theme i would like to say i would like to see a big laser make popcorn out of a whole field of corn almost like that real genious movie. Now that would be cool.
WAIT!!
Could that be why we are GPS'n the fields?
Mmmmmmmm...popcorn.
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
Alternatively we could get a clue and start paying the farmers what the market will bear, instead of subsidising them to produce grossly-resource intensive crap that destroys our health, screws the environment, costs us billions in tax (for subsidies), whilst millions starve, and only agrichemical multinationals and food processors benefit.
some , further reading...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
in fact, one of the leading software solutions for this is called satloc and its dos-based. I work for an agri organization that has been relying heavily gps for field mapping and spray application for many years now.
i am convinced that "/.ers" are homosexuals and imma make that my "sig"
Hopefully this means there will be more hay to roll in!
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At the end of the article, he said he was missing his dog, given that this is a NASA article, I'm assuming that they had room on a leftover Soyuz?
Black and grey are both shades of white.
Growing up in rural Iowa (no stoplights within a 20 mile radius even today), I can tell you that this is not a new concept. Heck, I remember the local paper (no web site, they're that much behind the times) running a multi-part story about farmers using GPS in 1996 or 1997.
Think For Yourself. Question Authority.
At least since the late 80's. I used to read some surveyor/gps magazines (like GPS World) back then, my father is in the remote sensing field, and this sort of thing used to be reported on monthly. I remember one article where the farmer used DEM type maps, ArcView, a WADGPS system for accurate placement, and a Newton (remember those) for data collection.
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This isn't really news. I suppose since it is being done with GPS it is "news for nerds" but Valmont industries (maker of Valley Sprinkler systems) has been putting sensors on their sprinkler systems for years. Then the sprinkler will talk to the farmers computer and let him know if there are problems with the soil or whatever else. The sprinkler also distributes fertilizer and the like automatically down to about 3 sq. feet.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
As many have pointed out, precision farming is not a new thing. Check this link for a bunch of companies involved:
e nt /Precision_Farming/
http://www.prairielinks.com/aglinks/Farm_Equipm
The GPS allows them to do some neat stuff not mentioned in the article.
Some systems can keep maps of the paths that equipment took traveling over a feild. This information can be used to guide the operator down the exact same path within an inch, or 2, on the next application. This can minimize crop damage from getting run over, and also reduces soil compaction.
Some systems can be programmed to know how wide of a swath the equipment covers, and can then guide the operator to get very accurate coverage without skips or overlap. This functionality is particularly valuable when making applications that can not be easily seen by the operator, such as sprays.
Better systems can even have a limited auto pilot feature that is integrated into the tractor. Once you are on track you tell the system to take over and it steers.
Cool stuff!
Kevin
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"-B.Franklin
A trend of paying off farmers to limit their productions, while trying to improve their crop yeild with technoligy?
contradiction in goals and practice?
Perhaps not.
If a farmer can use his rescources to the greatest possible result, he might be able to become self reliant again. Today most farmers are supplimented by govt. assistance programs. If the GPS system and other technological advancements help without raising the cost unreasonably. And the land that was needed was reduced in size and produced the same or more produce, this could free the farmers from needing assistance.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
So, like, you caught me using IE6 this time. It was funny the last six times (when I was browsing with Konqueror), but it's kind of a pain in the ass in IE. Is there a patch for this? Wait, let me guess...there's no patch 'cause it's not a bug, it's a feature.
My uncle has a combine that has GPS, he has had it for 5 or 6 years now. His boat has GPS, his car has GPS, hell, I think he even tracks his damn dog with it. That combine has a cd player and cost about ohhhhh a quarter million dollars, I think he even put a playboy rack in there
It's not the OS it's the user that sucks. If it's user friendly, you get stupider people. - clinko
I worked for Trimble a couple of years ago, and they had essentially autonomous tractors using a system called AutoSteer. Using kinematic differential GPS, accuracy is down to 1cm.
Construction equipment has 2 or 3 of these systems so slope can be maintained.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
A better technological breakthrough can be found in Agroecology. The problem with global agriculture is not with production. Global organizations such as the IMF and the WTO impose policies that force marginalized farming communities to grow food for export while they face lower incomes and a lack of self sustainablility. It has been shown that several smaller acre farms will outproduce a single larger industrial farm (in terms of production per acre).
Here is an excerpt from Peter Rosset, Joseph Collins, and Frances Moore Lappé's Lessons from the Green Revolution:
More Food and Yet More Hunger?
Despite three decades of rapidly expanding global food supplies, there are still an estimated 786 million hungry people in the world in the 1990s. Where are these 786 million hungry people? Since the early 1980s, media representations of famines in Africa have awakened Westerners to hunger there, but Africa represents less than one-quarter of the hunger in the world today. We are made blind to the day-in-day-out hunger suffered by hundreds of millions more. For example, by the mid-1980s, newspaper headlines were applauding the Asian success stories-India and Indonesia, we were told, had become "self-sufficient in food" or even "food exporters." But it is in Asia, precisely where Green Revolution seeds have contributed to the greatest production success, that roughly two-thirds of the undernourished in the entire world live.
According to Business Week magazine, "even though Indian granaries are overflowing now," thanks to the success of the Green Revolution in raising wheat and rice yields, "5,000 children die each day of malnutrition. One-third of India's 900 million people are poverty-stricken." Since the poor can't afford to buy what is produced, "the government is left trying to store millions of tons of foods. Some is rotting, and there is concern that rotten grain will find its way to public markets." The article concludes that the Green Revolution may have reduced India's grain imports substantially, but did not have a similar impact on hunger.
Such analysis raises serious questions about the number of hungry people in the world in 1970 versus 1990, spanning the two decades of major Green Revolution advances. At first glance, it looks as though great progress was made, with food production up and hunger down. The total food available per person in the world rose by 11 percent over those two decades, while the estimated number of hungry people fell from 942 million to 786 million, a 16 percent drop. This was apparent progress, for which those behind the Green Revolution were understandably happy to take the credit.
But these figures merit a closer look. If you eliminate China from the analysis, the number of hungry people in the rest of the world actually increased by more than 11 percent, from 536 to 597 million. In South America, for example, while per capita food supplies rose almost 8 percent, the number of hungry people also went up, by 19 percent. In south Asia, there was 9 percent more food per person by 1990, but there were also 9 percent more hungry people. Nor was it increased population that made for more hungry people. The total food available per person actually increased. What made possible greater hunger was the failure to address unequal access to food and food-producing resources.
The remarkable difference in China, where the number of hungry dropped from 406 million to 189 million, almost begs the question: which has been more effective at reducing hunger-the Green Revolution or the Chinese Revolution, where broad-based changes in access to land paved the way for rising living standards?
Whether the Green Revolution or any other strategy to boost food production will alleviate hunger depends on the economic, political, and cultural rules that people make. These rules determine who benefits as a supplier of the increased production-whose land and crops prosper and for whose profit-and who benefits as a consumer of the increased production-who gets the food and at what price.
On my uncle's farm for the past 6 years +, he has been using GPS tools while in tractor and then back home to get better information on what exactly is going on. For example, if an irigation system dies, then it keeps the same possistion and he gets a page immediatly. If a tractor stays in the same possistion he knows something is wrong, immediate page. The GPS devices are also used to track rodent populations. We can go out, find out where the holes are and record their possistion. Then we combine that data year after year and know exactly how say the mole or ant population is in the fields. Another thing we used them for on the farm was ATV Paintballing ...
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This is unbelievably interesting because I just got home from my Agriculture policy lecture where we were discussing this very thing. Precision farming.
The thing to keep in mind here is that this kind of technology only benefits farmers that are already efficiently using the things that aid agriculture (like fertilizer and pesticides). For instance... if you take a developing nation, precision farming doesnt help at all... the technology will spit out data that says "you need to use more of input A, input B, and input C, *everywhere*."
However, in North America, the benefits of this technology have unbelievable possibilities. The economic advantages of using your inputs in the most efficient way possible will produce the greatest yields farmers have ever seen.
Farmers typically are having trouble making profits (or so they say). profits are revenues minus costs, and the costs of agriculture are big. For large farms, these inputs are on such large economies of scale that the smallest advantages in using the inputs better will create very large increases in profits.
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Precision farming has been around a long time - 5 years at least. Before that there were a lot of farmers that were doing geographic sensing - using satellite imagery to see if there were moist soil areas, or other areas that yeilded better results, etc. The whole thing should work a lot better now with the (near)elimiation of Selective Availability (SA) so no more need for Differential GPS, which can get expensive to do real-time.
There are a ton of real good applications for GPS and GPS & GIS besides findout how far from the pin you are at 14.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
i was working for a company in 1992-3 called
Alamo Group in Seguin tx that was doing this.
not exactly bleeding edge stuff here.
Farming is tough business. Its a high tech world--if you don't take every advantage of technology you can, you'll loose the farm in short order to someone who will.
science is a religion
isn't the point to use this technology to cut down the blanketing of chemicals and make for a more judicial and economic use of chems? That's what we've been telling people since this started (this story is hardly new). Only problem I have with the whole scheme is the privatization of the data - it comes from the Landsat satellites - and a private corp gets to charge for them - big bucks too.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
They've had this tech for qutie a long time. I live on a farm, and I remember hearing about this stuff at least 5 years ago...
All this can be done without GPS, the satalittes and aircraft generally know where they are and since they are taking pictures and the farmers should be able to recognize their own fields, why exactly do they need GPS???? This might make things a little easier, but the easiest is to just furtalize evenly anyway, this whole we'll find bugs and only use insectisides in those places seems highly suspect, won't the bugs realize that there are other areas with less pesticides and go there, kinda like 3 card monty. GPS doesn't really help or suddenly make this feasable, NASA should be concerned with gett rockets up not inventing new ways to make themselves necessary. NASA should lauch satallites, Dept Ag should distibute photos, farmers should plan crops and control fields, we don't need to spend billions to grow corn that farmers are getting paid not to grow anyway. More technology to the people and stop major government projcets that don't work!!!!
we used gps systems to map the spread of an invasive weed in the yampa district in colorado. yellow toad flax, poisonous to the wild horses in the region, was pushing out the native plant life. accurate mapping of the weed allowed pinpoint spraying by teams (horseback and tractor) vice massive aerial application.
All of this is good news for American farmers, who have, for years, struggled to compete with the cheap labor in other countries. The only reason that most US farmers are still in business is because of inefficient government subsides; if the "american farmer" can be saved through effective technology and increased efficiency instead, all to it!
Read more about some new GPS-equipped tractors in an article from the January Progressive Farmer, "Deere Leaps Into Autosteer."
Excerpt:
"The farmers most likely to buy AutoTrac are those with large operations that require many field passes...
"Initially, [Deere] doesn't expect that will include a lot of row-crop applications. But it will include farmers who use wide tillage equipment or air seeders and farmers who have crops such as cotton that require a lot of field work.
"Like retrofit autosteer systems that have been on the market for a few years, Deere's AutoTrac relies on positioning information from satellites. Onboard computers process that information and use it to electronically steer...
"[How it works]...an operator makes an initial pass in a field as a computer records position information. The driver then turns the tractor at the headland, a computer screen helps him "acquire" a new parallel row and--at the push of a button--the computer takes control of the steering. The driver doesn't have to touch the steering wheel until he turns the tractor at the end of the new row....
"Deere's AutoTrac gets its 10-centimeter accuracy from the company's StarFire network, which uses multiple ground stations, computers and relay satellites to send positioning corrections to customers anywhere in North America."
They have been doing this since before the web.
Following the incredible discovery of fire, man's knowledge leaped forward with the invention of the wheel.
I'm sure if we could work towards distributing food more evenly, we wouldn't need to have to worry about increasing crop yields and stuff... surely we produce enough food to feed the world? Perhaps this goal is more admirable than trying to find a technological solution to every problem.
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Go Klerck! I'm running IE and still love the page widening. keep up the good work
BASF was doing this in 1995
I may be slightly off topic this reminded of a story.
Once upon a time there was a shepherd tending his sheep at the edge of a country road. A brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee screeches to a halt next to him. The driver, a young man dressed in a Brioni suit, Cerrutti shoes, Ray-Ban glasses, and Jovial Swiss wrist watch, gets out and asks the shepherd: "If I guess how many sheep you have, will you give me one of them?" The shepherd looks at the young man, then looks at the sprawling field of sheep and says: "Okay." The young man parks the SUV, connects his notebook and wireless modem, enters a NASA site, scans the ground using his GPS, opens a database and 60 Excel tables filled with algorithms, then prints a 150 page report on his high tech mini printer. He then turns to the shepherd and says: "You have exactly 1,586 sheep here." The shepherd answers: "That's correct, you can have your sheep." The young man takes one of the animals and puts it in the back of his vehicle. The shepherd looks at him and asks: "Now, if I guess your profession, will you pay me back in kind?" The young man answers: "Sure." The shepherd says: "You are a consultant." "Exactly! How did you know," asks the young man? Very simple, answers the shepherd. "First, you came here without being called. Second, you charged me a fee to tell me something I already knew. Third, you do not understand anything about my business and I'd really like to have my dog back."
duh.
how about a story on something revolutionary
and important. do you get funded by monsanto?
Using precision farming techniques DOES cut down on that stuff, by eliminating overlaps and reducing the margin of error.
"Organic farming" isn't the panacaea you think it is. True organic farming requires extreme biohazardous materials. Ever seen what comes out of a cow's rear end? Not the mass, I mean the little critters living in it. Throw that on a field, and watch the farmer grow lots of things that aren't fit for animal consumption, let alone human consumption. When the farmer has to work outside his/her tractor, EPA and OSHA regulations require a full biohazard suit, because the bacteria level is so high. Any injury will instantly go septic.
Organic farming isn't that dangerous? Think again. When you see that term on packaging, the packers are using an unregulated term that's full of propeganda.
So, are there any NewEngland agri-tech employers looking for UNIX Admins? Any non-internet centric companies with a penchant for biological systems and UNIX.
comment directly in my journal
I live in Saskatchewan, Canada. It is all farming up here. About 6 years ago, I taught an introductory HTML class. There was a combine salesman in attendance, he wanted to learn how to make a web page to help him sell combines. He had a brochure detailing gps equipped combines and sprayers that have sensors built in, etc. I asked him how many % of the combines he sells has this stuff built in. He said all combines are sold fully loaded now (that includes a cooler, air conditioning, air shock mounted seat, stereo system, gps guidance, computer monitoring systems on the output (they check for grain being wasted) etc. The harvest data from the gps system is even stored on a ram-card so that it can be fed into the seeder and sprayers! Literally all he sold were fully equipped. The farmer's rationalle: what is another 10 or 20 thousand when you are already spending $250,000 on one piece of equipment!
for img in `seq -w 1 113`; doe
wget http://ssmax.supereva.it/Aria/ariag$img.jpg;
don
I live in Saskatchewan, Canada. It is all farming up here. About 6 years ago, I taught an introductory HTML class. There was a combine salesman in attendance, he wanted to learn how to make a web page to help him sell combines. He had a brochure detailing gps equipped combines and sprayers that have sensors built in, etc. I asked him how many % of the combines he sells has this stuff built in. He said all combines are sold fully loaded now (that includes a cooler, air conditioning, air shock mounted seat, stereo system, gps guidance, computer monitoring systems on the output (they check for grain being wasted) etc. The harvest data from the gps system is even stored on a ram-card so that it can be fed into the seeder and sprayers! Literally all he sold were fully equipped. The farmer's rationalle: what is another 10 or 20 thousand when you are already spending $250,000 on one piece of equipment! alsdf
look here/ ams/in dexsub1.html/
http://customer.deere.com/ag/servicesupport
Land mine clearing is a tedious and extremely dangerous job. Everyday there are people being blown up, when trying to clearing up land-mines.
Since GPS has the whole world covered, and many "birds" (satellites) are flying over us are equipped with precision lenses, then... why don't we some how use the GPS precision measuring technique, along with the robo-mine-clearer, and start automate the land-mine clearing job ?
Although agriculture is important, if the land is mined, performing agricultural works on the land will be VERY DANGEROUS.
I sincerely hope NASA and
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Farmers have been using GPS regularly for just this described purpose since about 1995. Why is it just now making headlines? -JT
GPS: Left...Right...Left...Congratulations, you have just Frenched your daughter.
"I'm going steady, and I French kiss."
"Yeah, well, everybody does that."
"Well, Daddy says I'm the best at it."
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I know some farmers in North Dakota who do a LOT of field/crop work and they said that this GPS is an awesome tool. You can even get combines or tractors that are controlled by GPS. You could run them from your kitchen table, if you wanted. Just punch in the coordiates or tell it to move south 50 feet or make a right turn, et cetera. Of course these are not in use, but the prototypes are there. As for using GPS in combines/tractors, they use them commonly and I know they are trying to get them installed in most of their vehicles. Obviously if you farm 13.5 acres, it might not be worth your time. But for the farmers in ND, NE, KS, et cetera, this is something that makes their job a lot easier.
My cousin-in-law is from an Iowa farming family but has a knack for technology. The result is, he started working with an Iowa company to develop and deploy these a few years ago. They've been deploying these in the field (quite literally)for the last three years; he gave me an excellent demonstration at Christmas last year. They can tell everything about crop yields and, most significantly, remember the information and send it to a unit in the fertilizer spreaders to make sure the parts of the field with the lowest yield receive the most fertilizer. His father's farm, which has been doing this for three years, has already seen a more even distribution (and hence large overall production) across their 400 acres.
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
Various systems like this have been in use since at least the early 90's, and have been getting steadily better since. We implemented the idea in 95, and found the inforamtion it has provided us invaluable. The tractor and combine mounted computers are really the only ones my dad ever wants to use. It's really been too long since technology like this has made it to the farm.
John Deere has been doing this for awhile. Crap, they showed them at the local farm show two or more years ago. I'm sure the maps are much better, but the technology hasn't changed much. It still takes a good farmer to use it, which is getting rare these days in mass production.
Yee ha.
In 1994 I was working as an intern for a company that was creating firmware that would do this very thing. I was debugging some code from their version 3 so I assume this had been going on for a little while now.
Old spuds... This technique has been around for more than ten years - older than Linux... This site even provides a HOWTO:o nment/pr ecision/precision.htm
http://www.gov.on.ca/OMAFRA/english/envir
We've been using similar applications like this on out rice farm for a little over a year. Yeild monitors are hooked up to the combine (rice harvester) so the next year we can tell where the weak spots in the field were and adjust fertilizer rates accordingly. The same goes for herbicides. What I can't wait for to become more main streem is the automated tractor driving system that operates the tractor via GPS to navigate its way through the fields, therefore eliminating the need (and cost) of human labor.
Or not.
A couple of years ago during some time staying on a farm in Australia I got to go up for a ride with the crop duster. He was using DGPS to fly as close to the edges of the field as possible without too much overspray.
You may not think it is hard to know when you are over the edge of a field but this guy was flying low and fast with seriously sharp turns at each end. Down was not often down. I think we trimmed the tree tops with the wingtip into the bargian.
OF course this was not varying the dose over area by GPS but with big fields the advantages in cost saving make these cool toys well worth it to the farmer, and there is some environmetal advantage for free (As much as can be when tending a monoculture)
Maybe you live in interesting times
Farmer's Son: It's ok pa, We've got the GPS, it'll tell us where we are
Farmer: Good thinkin', junior
Farmer's Son: OK, y'all wait on, nearly got a signal.. OK, I got it!
Farmer: So, where are we?
Farmer's Son: We are at 123.45'56"E, 43.45'23"N
Farmer: So.....
Farmer's Son: Pa! Pa! I know where we are now!
Farmer: Where, son, where? Tell your old man
Farmer's Son: Well, Sir, Well, Pa, Well, we're in a corn field.
Well, nobody else made any farmer jokes!
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
The fact that radar is all-weather, night and day also means that it can be used in countries such as the UK, where the presence of clouds would be a major hassle
Some links:
NA Software (and I don't work for them)
how about some real news for nerds rob?
we are not farmers and we don't need "technology is good for the environment, afterall" hype.
Alexis Frisson
It is scary what get marked as "insightful" here.
Producing more and more food in an environmentally healthy way is basic requirement due to the population growth.
This is completely ortogonal to the question of solving the social and political problems that provent a fair distribution of the produced food and keep the population growth going.
Even if we do solve these problems in the best case we should expect the population to top in one or two generations at 15 to 20 billion people, due to the age distribition of the world population, and cultural resistance to change.
We need to fight at both fronts to get through this situation without mass starvation worse than everything seen on this planet before combined.
We need the technical means to increase production that much without destroying the environment in the process, and we need the social, economical and political changes that ensure this technoclogy is employed as well as ensure the population growth does eventually top in acceptable ways.
Believing we can get through with either technical or social changes alone is dangerously naive.
when this same technology is applied to
a) crop dusting
b) organic farming
(And no, the two are not mutually exclusive!!)
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
When I was farming with a friend seven years ago in Saskatchewan (Canada) we went to the Agribition in Regina. There were some students from the University of Saskatchewan there who were working on something like this. I think that I even remember talking to some corporate reps who talking about bringing this technology to the field soon. But too fully implement it you would have to put it in your tractor, on your combine, on your air seeder. In short you would have to put it on just about every implement. And the cost was prohibitive for all but the largest farmers. With the downturn in grain farming (again I speak with a Saskatchewan point of view in mind) I don't think farmers are looking for the latest and greatest. But I could be wrong. The guy who farmed next to us never used any fertilizer. Claimed it didn't work. He also never bothered to check how much grain he was spitting out of the bottom of his combine. He practically didn't have to plant next year he had so much grain coming out. He could of done two minor changes to his farming practises and seen big returns. Perhaps this will be a similiar situation. But the farmer is going to need to see possibility of big returns before he goes to the back to extend his line/line of credit/visa.
One cluesless AC posts how bio-hazard suits are needed, and gets modded up, while someone else calls her bluff, posts a link gets modded down.
amazing.
As many people have already pointed out, GPS has been used for years, but what it's been used for is not large-scale precision application of fertilizers or pesticides, but for yield mapping. With a GPS on the tractor, and a dynamic load-sensor on the harvester, you can determine how many pounds of product you're getting off of any given square yard. The application of fertilizers is still much broader scale than that, and the reason has to do with the soil.
During a post-doc at Michigan State, I helped develop a grant proposal to develop a precision-ag system back in 1998. The biggest sticking point in the whole project was the fact that the efficacy of fertilizers is strongly influenced by the soil characteristics: drainage, % organic matter, ratios of sand/silt/clay, etc. Maybe in Kansas the soil is completely uniform on a meter-scale, but in most areas, it varies significantly. A given section of a corn field may be underproducing, not becasue it coudl use more fertilizer, but because it's sitting on top of a two-meter clay lens that won't allow it to use the fertilizer you've been giving it.
To make meter-scale chemical application worth the extra effort (and information management is a big effort/cost), you have to have soil profiling done on a meter-scale, and that is a hell of a lot of soil samples that have to be processed. Unlike yield mapping, you can't just turn on the laptop in the cab of the tractor and start rolling.... in a precision soil-mapping project, that's thousands of little bags of soil to be sent back to the lab for chemical and physical analysis, in addition to any nematode or insect tests.
To top it off, the soil profile of a given field changes with time, so the hugely expensive detailed soil map that you made three years ago? Gotta go do it again.
I wish them luck.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
seeing a barcode scanner at the grocery store.
Come on guys this is old, old news.
Next thing you'll be talking about how ships
are using GPS for navigating the sees!
WOW!
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
I write software for this industry for a living. We collect field boundaries, fertilizer and pesticide data (types and amounts used, application method), and other farming practices. When it comes time to harvest the crop, a device called a yield monitor (GPS plus flow and other sensors) collects data on how much crop is harvested at a given point in the field.
It's an idea that had been gaining a lot of momentum in the farming industry for a while, but it is starting to become apparent it is not as useful as they thought. The growers like the pretty pictures the GPS maps give them, but their utility as tools is severely limited. Changing levels of chemical application in a field does not have as much of an impact as you would think. Not to mention the education level of the average ag worker is not all that high, so data collection is a difficult process.
What IS useful however is statistical analysis of these farming practices. Seed companies like Pioneer have universities run tests on their varieties and report on the results. The problem is that these tests are all conducted on tiny "test plots" of a fraction of an acre. It's simply too small a sample to get reliable results. With the data we have collected, we can state with a fair degree of certainty what farming practices will result in higher yields. Conventional vs No-Till farming, what crop order to rotate, what row spacing to plant at, etc.
--
David Christpher Asher
AgVenture, LLC.
I've built up so much character I have an alter-ego
It's been in use for some time. I think we tend to underestimate the amount of technology available to farmers today. Last summer my cousin in Iowa gave me a tour of some of his cooler toys... the cab of his combine is reminiscent of an x-wing cockpit.
I thought i could be cool and show off my knowledge of farming by telling you all this has been being done for... a long time.. but.. i'm late :( oh well
The industrialization of farming is destroying the soil in many areas.
Part of the problem is the price-pressure put on farmers by the large distributors. This forces small farms out of business.
On a small farm, the owner can learn the properties of his field through years (a lifetime) of care. On a large industrial operation, the tractor operator is unlikely to have this expertise.
The result is: improper plowing depths, improper fertilization and massive tractors packing the soil and destroying the microflora. This isn't such an issue on the huge flat fields of the midwest, but it's a crucial factor leading to the current desecration of farmland in the hilly, highly varied landscapes found in Europe.
The long term effects are not quite upon us yet. but future generations will curse our greed, in this as in other endeavors.
Who'se at fault? Well I argue that for reasons of sustainability of food production, the family farm needs to make a comeback. This can only be achieved by smashing the grain cartels.
It does seem like a great idea, however these are the most important reasons I won't use them.
1) This sounds VERY expensive, and in the end it doesn't accomplish any more then what a competent farmer can do.
2) In a decade where we are beginning to learn that "Producing more" doesn't mean winning, most farmers are REDUCING their amount of acres to grow the most unusual crops a person has ever seen. Pumpkins, flowers (for seeds for urban gardeners), etc. What use would I have for one of these when I have a field consisting of 15 acres of a crop that keeps my farm going?
As many posts to this site have pointed out, using GPS in agriculture is not new. However, there is one application that would be of great economic and environmental value. An affordable centimeter range differential GPS signal that can be used for a farm sized area would allow farmers to drive tractors through their fields year after year and always drive in the same place. This ability seems like it would be trivial and only of intrest to the technocrat, but the reality of the situation is quite different. Every time a tractor drives through a field it compacts and damages the soil. By making the same tractor passes year after year, a farmer could seperate his farmland into plantland and narrow strips of tractorland.
But, there is a more important application. If a farmer is able to always drive in the same spot, he can do more exotic things to the other parts of the field without risk of damaging them. One of the possibilities (which is already being tested by the Malheur Experiment Station) is permanent buried drip irrigation systems. This modifies the existing drip irrigation systems by buring the tape about 11 inches below the soil and leaving it in for multiple seasons. This significantly decreases the cost of using drip irrigation. The drip irrigation is a small buried tape which emits water in the root zone of the plants. It allows the minimum ammount of water to be applied to irrigate a crop. This has many invironmental benefits. Because no excess water is applied to the field, there is no runoff, which can contain agricultural chemicals. There is also no excess water, so a process called leaching does not take place. In this process excess water seeps down through the soil, carrying with it ag chemicals, and fertilizer, both naturaly occuring and artificial. When the nitrogen is not leached out of the soil, less fertilizer must be applied to the field to produce similar yields.
High precission farm GPS will help to minimize damage to fields from tractor traffic, enable the use of permantent drip irrigation systems, and possibly technologies which have not yet been concieved. These technologies are of significant interest because they will allow more economic and environmentaly friendly farming practices in the future.
Here at Rutgers, our busses are linked to a gps network so I can check when to wait out in the freezing cold for the next A bus. Check it out http://www.whereismybus.com
Alex Toeffler wrote a book a decade ago on the different waves of technology- agriculture, industry, and tech/knowledge. The eariler waves don't disappear, but are enhanced by the later waves. Agriculture is enhanced by both industry and high tech.
are you impressed yet?
I might point out that you are entirely wrong. If you've ever actually LOOKED at a commercial product that was grown organically, on it will be a phrase "grown and processed in accordance with the California Organic Foods act of 1990" or similar for whatever state your in. yep, Sounds pretty hazardous and unregulated to me. Also having worked on an organic farm, wallowing knee-deep in your so-called biohazardous materials with nothing more that a pair of shoes (sometimes not even that) between me and that horrible "organic filth" we call dirt, I can only hope that the people reading your post are intelligent enough to know your full of shit, most likely a crop duster in real life....
so basically all I'm trying to say is, fuck you. Anyone can moderate with one account and then reply as an AC, so don't think you're too clever, little child.
As an avid drug user, I am completely serious.
--Metrollica