Like you, I get queasy when pundits talk about our farming future being awash in information and GPS. Honestly, they won’t shut up about GPS. If your information technologies have given you more rising costs than rising profits and you have it up here, then let me take your quivering hand and show you the gleam in my eyes of a future where automation trumps information and the less we know, the better.
I don’t mean to say field records and layers and layers of maps are bad, but effectiveness comes from getting the one piece of information necessary to make a decision, and leaving the rest unseen.
For starters, the collection of field information will become more automated. Now we have to spend time recording information which is gathered on one part of a machine but not communicating with another. Now we have to tell the machine what kind of machine it is—in the future, the controller will simply query the machine and implement for identity. Now we must key in time, location, and weather information. In the future, the first two will be taken automatically from GPS signals and the last from on-board sensors and Internet weather sites. Seed, chemicals, and fertilizers will be scanned and recorded automatically in the field.
Rather than carry field records on a motley array of proprietary file types and data cards, it will upload wirelessly to a central server on the farm, where it will be available in real-time from the office or the field and any other location via the Internet. In the tractor, for example, a large color touch-screen will show an intuitive browser similar to, or particularly, Windows Explorer. Almost all of what we look at there—aerial images, coverage, yield, and application maps—will be purely graphical. Waving your hand across the screen to pan, and zooming in and out will be playfully obvious and useful and most similar to today’s Google Earth.
Trying to decide on the economics of a tillage operation and you want to see a map of fuel usage from last time? You didn’t know you collected it, you didn’t know you saved it, but you imagined it, and in three taps on the screen, it is there, color gradients showing the fuel usage across the whole field.
Being online not only allows instant access to the full archives of previously recorded information, but to real-time status of the farm. In the combine, for example, you can be watching radar maps from the Internet, see the locations of trucks and grain carts, and monitor and control the conveyers, fans, and dryer at the grain bins.
While the smartness of machines will make our lives easier, it is the automations that will make us more profitable. To be worthwhile, machine controls ought to do a better job than what we can do humanly. RTK positioning will not only steer machines, but apply seed, chemicals, and fertilizer with row-by-row controls that shut down at waterway and headland boundaries.
Rather than small incremental savings that result from reducing overlap, extreme precision allows large step increases in savings and yield. That’s because controlling spray nozzles with enough precision to avoid having to outline waterways, as well as controlled-traffic farming, strip-tillage, and intercropping can only be automated with centimeter-level machine controls.
On most farms uniformity of application across a machine when planting, fertilizing, and spraying contains larger gains that what is available from variable-rate application, which is and will be for a long time, hampered by voodoo yield-response estimates that can cause more harm than good. Active monitoring of seed furrow quality, fertilizer flow through tubes, and plugged spray nozzles will be just as imporant as planter monitors are now.
Land and the sunlight and rain that fall upon it—and not machinery and labor—are the most precious resources in American agriculture. These automations are a byproduct of that reality and possess synergies with practices such as no-till and strip-till which conserve them.
The emphasis on feedback and control as with the future application sensors will meet its nexus with water management through better knowledge of our drainage systems. With small pipe-crawling robots we will map, inspect, and repair our drainage tile and that underground, unknown world that is so imporant will become as visible to us as the sky.
If you don’t believe me, then come visit me and see these technologies at work. And in the field, we can make free international phone calls from my sprayer controller while we’re at it.
