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infocus:farm

Row Space and Outer Space

GPS Satellite Technology Giving Farmers Direction in Their Fields

By Lindsay Robison

Late at night, driving out in the country, lighted object in the fields … don’t rub your eyes and don’t worry, you haven’t been transported to Area 51 nor are you seeing a UFO. What you are seeing is a farmer taking advantage of technology that allows him or her to work any time of the day in all sorts of conditions.

Global positioning technology is making the lives of farmers across the country a little easier. This GPS technology won’t give famers directions to their fields – they already know where those are – but it will steer their farm equipment for them, allowing them to focus on the other tasks for which they’re responsible while in the field, all the while giving sub-inch accuracy when it comes to row spacing.

“We like to say we turn a tractor driver into a tractor operator,” says Mike O’Connor, chief technology officer and co-founder of AutoFarm, a company that manufactures GPS equipment for planters, sprayers, and combines. “He can hit a button in the steering, which is the most tedious part of the job, and it’s taken over by a computer, and computers are great at doing tedious things. The operator can look around and make sure there’s nothing in his path, make sure the fertilizer is coming out correctly, that nothing is getting clogged up in terms of the application system, that all the seeders are working properly, and things like that.”

In the early 1990s, O’Connor and some fellow graduate students at Stanford were working with GPS technology, looking for ways to apply the technology to usable consumer products. They started out landing airplanes. The group worked with a professor landing his personal airplane, and then somehow convinced United Airlines to let them borrow a 737, which they were able to land hands-free with a test pilot.

They began looking for other outlets that could benefit from GPS steering, and in a brainstorming session decided agriculture could be one of these outlets. “We did a little proof-of-concept demonstration on a golf cart, which we were driving around the Stanford campus,” O’Connor says. “We went to John Deere and said ‘Hey, what do you think?’ and they got excited. So they gave us a tractor and some sponsorship, and we were able to demonstrate, for the first time ever, hands-free steering on farm tractors using GPS.”

From the airplane and agricultural equipment testing, the group of students decided to start their own company, IntegriNautics, which is now called Novariant, the parent company of AutoFarm. NASA had been partnering with Stanford in some of its GPS research, so in 1994 when this group started IntegriNautics, NASA awarded them the Small Business Technology Transfer contract that helped them turn their technology into products that could be used in the consumer marketplace.

AutoFarm introduced its AutoSteer GPS hands-free precision steering equipment to the public in 2000. AutoFarm’s equipment is what O’Connor calls “aftermarket” and is compatible with different brands of equipment and can be moved from piece to piece as needed. Companies like John Deere and Case IH also offer GPS precision steering for their equipment. John Deere offers the GreenStar Guidance System, which it introduced in 2002, and Case IH offers AFS AccuGuide. These companies offer precision steering standard on some models and as aftermarket add-ons for other models.

Whether it comes standard on a tractor, sprayer, or combine, or the farmer adds it on to his or her equipment later, it is a complex system that doesn’t just automatically works for the farmer. For the farmer to be able to get sub-inch accuracy there has to be a fixed reference station that does not move, a sort of calibration point, according to O’Connor. “Because it is in a fixed, known location, it’s tracking the GPS satellites, and it can correct any errors associated with GPS because it knows it is staying still,” he says. “So it sits there and calibrates the GPS and sends its calibration information on a radio broadcast to any vehicles in that area that care to use and apply it.”

When using the GPS system and its reference station, a farmer will go out into a field to the beginning of the first pass. At this spot the farmer hits a button on the system to set up a reference point – or an A point. At the end of the first pass, the farmer hits a button to set a B point and inputs the width of the piece of equipment being used. This directs the system where it needs to drive. “So maybe it’s a 25-foot implement,” O’Connor says. “Your tractor is like a computer mouse in the field – you click the A point, you click the B point and from there it propagates through the field and every 25 feet there’s another place the computer knows that’s where you want it to go.” The precision steering equipment includes a monitor located in the cab that leads the farmer through the necessary steps, showing him or her the location of the tractor in the field.

The farmer gives each field on the system a name, storing the coordinates of the field to the name, so the next time the farmer returns to that particular field, the name is recalled and the computer can take the equipment back through the same passes the farmer planted. “Using this technology, the farmer can do that any time in the season and the next season,” says Emily Harringa, communications specialist for John Deere. “It’s season to season, year to year.”

This technology has been getting a lot of attention. In 2004, experts estimated that approximately 15 percent of farmers had some sort of precision-controlled farming equipment. In June 2007, Spinoff magazine, NASA’s publication that features its successfully commercialized technology, named AutoFarm’s GPS steering one of the Top 20 space program spinoff technologies of the past five years. And farm equipment dealers told Farm Equipment magazine in a survey in the October/November 2007 issue that GPS systems hold the most potential when it comes to improving sales in 2008.

But GPS auto steering not only helps farm equipment sales, it helps the farmers as well as the environment. Because the system allows farmers to calibrate their fields across different types of equipment, every piece can take the same path when planting, fertilizing, spraying, and harvesting. This eliminates skips and overlaps, which saves farmers time while allowing them to farm more acres in less time with more yields. It reduces the amount of fertilizer and chemicals sprayed onto the field – as much as 5 percent, according to a 2004 CBS News article – because the substances can be distributed directly to where the seeds have been planted instead of spraying it all over the field – which is ultimately better for the environment and less costly for the farmer.

With the tractor steering itself, farmers can pay attention to other things going on in the field, which reduces their stress and fatigue. “Trying to be accurate in planting can be one of the most stressful deals,” says Joe Robertson, communication manager at AutoFarm, “because if you don’t plant accurately you’re messed up for the rest of the season.”

“The benefits really pencil out when you think of the economic value,” O’Connor says. “Just the quality of life is a big deal. When you have a $200,000 tractor, a $30,000 system to make it twice as efficient is often what drives someone to buy the system.”

“One of our favorite quotes we got from a customer was: ‘It’s as important as air conditioning in the cab, this guidance,’” says Harringa. “I think that there are people who were running great without it, they just never realized how much better they could be doing with the GPS assistance. Customers who use it absolutely love it, and at this point don’t know what they would do without it.”