Meeting the challenges of farming with a little help from space

26.09.2006

It is no wonder that few young people have the courage to take up farming these days. Farming is in danger of becoming an old man’s profession.

The European Council of Young Farmers (Conseil Europe’en des Jeunes Agricultures, CEJA) is fighting against this. Founded in Rome in 1958, the organisation represents around one million European farmers. The objective of the CEJA is to to improve the situation of young farmers in Europe by promoting the development of agriculture and rural areas within the EU; facilitating conditions for young people to establish a career in agriculture; acting as a forum for communication and dialogue between young farmers in Europe; informing, training, organising and representing young farmers in Europe; and informing society about the roles of agriculture.

This year CEJA members had the chance to experience the exotic nature of Finland when a seminar on the European model of farming was held in Oulu, the northernmost venue ever for a CEJA meeting. The seminar, which was held on 23-25 September, attracted over 100 delegates from all across Europe – from Portugal to Lithuania. They were perhaps attracted by the promise of brilliant foliage and dinners of wild game, as usually these seminars attract only half the number of members.

The hot subject at the seminar was new technology, which was presented in part by Finnish companies Kemira GrowHow and Valtra, a long-time supporter of CEJA.

Auto-Guide increases efficiency

Modern farming is more about technique than power. Consumers who think that the origin of the milk they buy means what shop they buy it from will no doubt be surprised at the level of technology that today’s farmers can – and indeed have to – utilise.

Those who earn their living from the land are facing heavy pressure from all sides. The ever-increasing size of farms means that farmers simply do not have enough time to handle all the required tasks. As a result, subcontractors have to be hired or expensive investments made in equipment and technology. The use of fertilisers and pesticides should be reduced, yet at the same time production should be boosted. As the use of chemicals cannot be increased, the essence of the problem is: how to increase the efficiency of existing resources? The solution to this comes from a surprising direction: space.

Precision farming, for example custom fertilising each area of field, used to be practically impossible. Even if aerial photography and soil samples could be used to determine the condition of different areas and the amount of fertiliser thus required, in practice farmers had a tough time knowing exactly where he was driving his tractor at any one time. This changed completely with the widespread introduction of GPS – global positioning systems using satellites to pinpoint current location. This technology further improved in 2000 when the US removed the built-in errors that had initially been included for defence considerations. Once this “intentional degradation” had been removed, the accuracy of GPS positioning improved from 100 metres to 5-10 metres.

Today, precision farming can be employed to prevent potential quality problems due to over or under fertilising and to achieve considerable savings in labour costs. However, this is just the beginning for utilising GPS in agriculture. Tractors without drivers using satellites may still sound like science fiction, but agricultural machinery manufacturers have taken big steps in recent years towards realising this possibility.

At the CEJA seminar in Oulu, research agronomist Jussi Kaarlonen presented new GPS-based automated driving technologies that have been designed for implements. Two types of these systems are currently offered by manufacturers: Simple visual control devices, and more complex implements that can control the tractor’s operations.

The simplest solutions are similar to the GPS systems commonly found in passenger cars today, using LED lights or 3D screens to tell the driver where to steer in order to stay on the right course. These systems can be programmed to achieve perfectly straight rows across entire fields or more complex driving patterns for irregular fields. Visual guide systems offer considerable advantages when working on large fields, avoiding the same section of field from being ploughed more than once or not ploughed at all. Following the directions on the screen also makes it possible to work efficiently in poor visibility, at night, in fog, on row crops and in dusty conditions.

The most advanced agricultural GPS systems, such as Valtra’s Auto-Guide that goes on sale in 2007, feature mechanical components that are connected directly to the tractor’s control valves. Once the driver has programmed the desired course into the system, the system guides the tractor over the field automatically. The steering is not yet fully automated, as the driver still has to turn the tractor in the headland at the end of each row. Current systems also cannot react to unexpected objects that are in the way, so the driver still has an important role to play. Nevertheless, semi-automated steering significantly lightens the load for the driver, who no longer has to focus constantly on maintaining the perfect line. Efficiency also improves since automated steering allows faster driving speeds, longer days and more precise work.

It may seem strange to have to invest in expensive customised agricultural GPS systems, as comparable systems for passenger cars are available today for only a few hundred euros. The simple difference is that car systems are no where near precise enough for farming purposes, updating positioning data once a second. The latest agricultural systems are five times faster. Passenger car systems may seem precise, but in fact they assume that the car is being driven along a road at all times, even when the car may be 5 metres from the road. Naturally this function is not useful for working on fields, when exact positioning is required at all times – preferably down to the nearest centimetre.

Even if the position is updated several times a second, GPS systems still include a certain margin of error due to electromagnetic disturbances in the atmosphere and air pressure variances. Differential GPS, or simply DGPS, improves precision significantly. DGPS uses two or more receivers to observe the same set of satellites. A reference receiver, placed at a known location, calculates its theoretical position and compares it to the measurements provided by the navigation satellite signals. The difference between the two values reveals the measurement error. The reference receiver then transmits a corrected signal to any number of receivers at unknown positions within the area covered by the DGPS. The accuracy of global satellite positioning is thereby increased significantly.

Corrected DGPS signals can already be purchased from independent service providers such as Omnistar, which promises accuracy within ten centimetres. Usually these services charge an annual fee, and the quality is not always the best possible. For example, Omnistar’s system takes up to half an hour each time to calibrate the error out of the user’s GPS system.

A better, if more expensive solution, is to install your own receiver. Valtra’s Auto-Guide system includes the option of a receiver that can be placed at the edge of a field. In practice this offers accuracy of 2-5 centimetres. Also, following the initial investment, there are no additional costs involved.

Technology advancing slowly but surely

The advantages of the latest technology are not yet widely known. For example, the use of GPS in farming was new to German CEJA representative and farmer Emma Hartmann. “This is really interesting. I can imagine that this kind of technology is really useful on fields over 200 hectares in size, for example,” Hartmann commented. She admitted that she could be a potential customer, as she currently cultivates a couple of hundred hectares of potatoes on her family farm in northern Germany.

Swedish CEJA representative Ingrid Petterson was also impressed, seeing a place for Auto-Guide technology even on 30-40 hectare fields. Petterson couldn’t help but imagining all the new technology that could be introduced for farmers. “Few people know how high-tech farming already is these days,” Petterson remarked.

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