The solar storms that knocked out GPS networks in early May — prime planting time in the Midwest — cost farmers a “nontrivial” amount of revenue that depends on how long their equipment was sidetracked, said Terry Griffin, a Kansas State University professor.
Some farmers reported intermittent problems throughout the weekend of May 10-12. Others said their tractors shut down. “For farms relying on GPS (i.e., navigation, automated row shutoffs, variable rate input applications), whole-farm losses may be nontrivial,” wrote Griffin at the farmdoc daily blog. “Intuitively, downtime during crucial planting windows is associated with yield [per acre] penalties and reduced revenue.”
The amount would hinge on how long the delay was and whether planting was completed on time when fieldwork resumed. Late-planted corn and soybeans have lower yields. One way to estimate the revenue impact would be to count how many acres on a farm were planted late, the likely bushel-per-acre reduction in yield for each day past ideal planting time, and the market price per bushel for corn.
Losses could be a few thousand dollars for a half-day delay, Griffin suggested, but the amount would vary according to an individual farm’s planting capacity. Losses would be larger if a high-volume planter was sidelined than for a smaller planter that would seed fewer acres.
GPS is used on 70 percent of U.S. planted cropland for at least one purpose, according to USDA estimates. Applications can range from GPS-guided steering of tractors to plotting high- and low-yielding parts of a field during harvest.
Losses of farm data benefits, such as harvest-time yield maps, are harder to estimate than losses due to planting delays, wrote Griffin. “Lack of GPS for logging geo-referenced farm data prevents farm operations from mapping yields, analyzing on-farm experiments, negotiating farmland leases with landowners, or participating in third-party data services.”
“The next generation of autonomy is being developed to use machine vision, artificial intelligence, and expert systems for guidance to avoid vulnerability to GPS outages,” wrote Griffin. “When future GPS outages occur during peak field operations, farm operators should be certain if the problem is a local hardware issue or geomagnetic event; knowledge of the possible repercussions of solar activity is important.”
Farmers in the top corn, wheat, soybean, and hog states are twice as likely as farmers in smaller-volume states to use precision agriculture practices, such as GPS guidance, according to USDA’s biennial farm computer report. Usage often topped 50 percent in the top row-crop states. The report asked operators if they used practices such as GPS steering; GPS yield monitoring and soil mapping; variable rate input applications; drones to scout fields or monitor livestock; electronic tagging; precision feeding; or robotic milking.
Farmer adoption of precision agriculture equipment and technology, available since the 1990s, has been slow due to barriers beyond the high acquisition costs, said a congressional report in February. Producers also face the challenges of analyzing the reams of data generated by the devices, poor internet service in some areas, and incompatibility of equipment.