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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."
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Will this improve the quality of crop circles?
"We shall show mercy, but we shall not ask for it" -- Winston Churchill
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.
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.
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.
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!"
:)
GPS jewels could be useful for (say) your girlfriend. Imagine, you go with her to the shopping center and suddenly you realize that she's gone somewhere else while you were looking at (say) computer games. Hence, you fire up your GPS reciver and trace your girlfriend in the shopping center
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
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.
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.
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 ...
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
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."
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."
It has been shown that several smaller acre farms will outproduce a single larger industrial farm (in terms of production per acre).
Hmmm. Can you cite? This would be an interesting figure....
And it sortof contradicts what you say below... if it's not the quantity that matters any more, why does it matter that several smaller farms can outproduce.
Is there a better distribution effect from several smaller farms?
And how DO you solve the problem of distribution?
Tweet, tweet.
Agreed. And on top of that, the findings were that it didn't help. They found that the areas that did not yield well did not improve with application of more fertalizer. And there is only so much fertalizer you can put on a given spot. It basically came down that it was best to just use the same amount all over, as there was not even enough gain to evercome the added time and effort (read: money).
"And there is only so much fertalizer you can put on a given spot. "
Umm, that's sort of the point. If the soil won't benefit from the fertilizer, there is no point in applying it because it will just run off into the water system.
Using this technology they can also vary the rate at which seeds are put in the ground. Since some soil will support more plants than others, this saves the cost of seed in the bad areas.
The debate when I was working with this back in 1994 was the cost/benefit analysis. At that time the equipment was incredibly expensive. A good GPS receiver was at least $5k, and a computer powerful enough to process the maps another $5-10k. Not to mention the equipment from Agchem and others to do variable rate application.
The costs of much of the technology has come down dramatically since then. That $10k computer back then is less powerful than what you can buy for $500 today, same with the GPS receivers and so on.
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
>In a system of larger agricultural farms, farm owners tend to be very rich and farm workers are very poor: the rural economy is transformed from one of self-suficiency to one in which farmers are forced to make livings as wage earners. The point is, more small farms means more farmers producing for themselves rather than becoming dependent on the poor wages derived from farm work.
The problem with small farms here in America, is that the economics of food, combined with the overhead of our society, has made it very hard to keep a farm that is small enough to be run by a typical family.
Farms must get bigger in order to make enough to stay in business. We all bitch and moan if the price of milk goes up by a nickel a gallon. After the grocery, and the middle men, and the processors all take their cut, that leaves about 1 penny for the dairymen. In USA the price of milk to farmers right now is about what it was in 1981. You can bet everything else has gone up.
Even the small diversified subsistance farmer, who plans to grow a variety of crops and products that he can eat and use himself, still needs to make enough money to pay local taxes, school taxes, state taxes, federal taxes, sales taxes, a mortgage, and put his kids through 4 years a Cornell.
Kevin
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 . . . !!!
True. I personally know a large family farm that did this a while back (4 years or so???). They have decent land.
After going through all the analysis and work, they had a net loss over all, because at the end of it all, there was so little land where the research dictate a change that it was MUCH more cost effective to just ignore it all together.
This would probably be different if more of the land would dictate a change in behaivor.
I might also add that they farm A LOT of land, and that they are very good in terms of conservation, crop rotation, and so. They farm for profit, and they do that by properly sustaining their land.
And they're good people, too.
I used to work in this industry. We sold software and services that did the GIS/mapping work from the data collected from Agleader yield monitors, etc. Actually our company was about 1/2 mile down the road from Agleader.
We only worked with Independent Ag consultants, and what you say is correct. There was a lot of manual labor involved collecting GPS positioned data... soil samples, insect and weed locations, etc. Then over the winter all of this data would be collected together and plotted into plans for the next season. It was a feedback loop of sorts.
But I agree, that cost/benefit analysis is a big part of it. At the time I was in this, there was a suspicion that the EPA was going to get involved and start changing the rules on pesticide application, etc... which would mean you pretty much had to go to variable rate application in order to comply.
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
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.
Discover or Popular Mechanics or some magazine had an article on this in 1994 also, right after .mil removed the accuracy restrictions on civilian GPS receivers.