NEW YORK-Wireless telecommunications and computer information systems are fast bringing agriculture to the brink of the next green revolution, known as precision farming.
“Farming has been in the dark ages technologically. Precision farming today is as significant as was the tractor replacing the plow,” said Max Crandall, an agronomist who is global manager of agricultural products for Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc., Redlands, Calif. ESRI makes geographic information systems, including three-dimensional ones, that translate satellite data into the readable contour maps that are part of the precision farming process.
The development started earlier this decade with garage tinkering by Midwestern corn and soybean farmers intent on maximizing crop yields while minimizing the use of inputs like herbicides, pesticides, fertilizer, seed and water.
They jury-rigged receivers onto their equipment that could tap satellite positioning data to map out their fields with grids corresponding to square-yard segments. Using handheld computers and yield monitors, they compiled data pegged to those grids about agricultural inputs and outcomes. With geographic information systems, they analyzed the feedback. Then, they cued their farm equipment to apply exactly what was needed in each segment.
It’s a far cry from the old-fashioned way of handwritten notes about average yields and inputs on each field that farmers keep in their shirt pockets. And it still has a way to go: to further refine and reduce the cost of the methodology; to disperse it among different kinds of crops, besides small grains; to deploy it outside the Midwest in other locales inside and outside the United States.
Recognizing the potential of precision farming, however, major corporations have gotten on board to serve the agricultural market.
“About five years ago, some very innovative and highly technically qualified farmers, decided to build their own receivers and monitors to be more accurate in their measurement of yields,” said Paul Hamm, marketing applications specialist for Case Corp.’s advanced farming systems in Racine, Wis. “There was all kinds of cobbling together without compatibility or integration.”
In the fall of 1995, Case launched its initiative, working with 50 customers to develop a fully integrated, advanced-or precision-farming system. It became the first company in the agricultural equipment industry to do so, Hamm said.
Another important corporate player in precision farming is Trimble Navigation Ltd., which makes the radio receivers used in this new agriculture, including those that are part of Case’s integrated system.
The whole process starts with the Global Positioning Satellite system, whose feedback the U.S. Department of Defense makes available free to anyone, anywhere, said George Huber, marketing manager of precision agricultural systems for Trimble in Overland Park, Kan. For security reasons, in a process known as selective availability, the Defense Department scrambles its GPS land mapping signals so that their accuracy often is no greater than 330 feet from the desired point. Even without military intervention, natural phenomena in the atmosphere also distort the location signals.
To counteract the selective availability feature of GPS and align the land mapping to an accuracy range of one square yard, a process known as differential correction is employed. This is carried over the airwaves via FM subcarriers, spread spectrum technology, geostationary satellites like those operated by American Mobile Satellite Corp. and OmniStar, UHF and VHF television signals and by U.S. Coast Guard beacon broadcasts.
Trimble designs and manufactures proprietary receivers that work with GPS and a variety of differential correction options. The heart of the system “is powerful, dedicated microprocessors built onto custom chips from Motorola (Inc.),” Huber said. The receivers also are made sufficiently rugged so their components aren’t damaged by the temperatures, vibrations, dirt and moisture they will encounter on their ride around the fields.
The next big market for satellite-aided farming is in guidance, or parallel swathing, Huber said. “Most agricultural equipment has a swathe width of 30 feet to even 100 feet,” he said. “You can make more efficient use of equipment, avoiding overlaps and skips in applying fertilizer, for example. And you can extend your hours of operation to day and night. This becomes more important to high value crops like tomatoes, potatoes and sugar beets.”
“It is a revolution of sorts, but the technology is evolving slowly,” said Todd Peterson, precision farming specialist for Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc., Johnston, Iowa.
“Only recently has it become cost effective. It cost about $20,000 in 1992 and is now down to about $2,000. But the technology still is relatively expensive and fertilizer, at least, is still pretty cheap.”
Pioneer Hi-Bred, one of the world’s largest seed companies, derives performance information about the seeds it produces from the yield mapping done through precision farming. It works with farmers to determine the best choices based on the data.
While kinks need to be worked out in terms of information processing capabilities and other aspects of precision farming, its promise is for dramatic crop yield increases much needed by a hungry and growing world population, all those interviewed said. And there is another significant benefit promised by this new technique-environmental protection resulting from the diminished need for fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, water and power, while producing greater crop yields per acre.
