Solar Storm Knocks Out Farmers' Tractor GPS Systems During Peak Planting Season (404media.co) 99
mspohr shares a report: The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season, 404 Media has learned. These outages caused many farmers to fully stop their planting operations for the moment. One chain of John Deere dealerships warned farmers that the accuracy of some of the systems used by tractors are "extremely compromised," and that farmers who planted crops during periods of inaccuracy are going to face problems when they go to harvest, according to text messages obtained by 404 Media and an update posted by the dealership.
The outages highlight how vulnerable modern tractors are to satellite disruptions, which experts have been warning about for years. "All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now shut down because of the solar storm," Kevin Kenney, a farmer in Nebraska, told me. "No GPS. We're right in the middle of corn planting. I'll bet the commodity markets spike Monday." Specifically, some GPS systems were temporarily knocked offline. This caused intermittent connections and accuracy problems with "Real-Time Kinematic" (RTK) systems, which connect to John Deere "StarFire" receivers that are in modern tractors and agricultural equipment. RTK systems use GPS plus a stream of constantly-updating "correction" data from a fixed point on the ground to achieve centimeter-level positional accuracy for planting crops, tilling fields, spraying fertilizer and herbicide, etc.
The outages highlight how vulnerable modern tractors are to satellite disruptions, which experts have been warning about for years. "All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now shut down because of the solar storm," Kevin Kenney, a farmer in Nebraska, told me. "No GPS. We're right in the middle of corn planting. I'll bet the commodity markets spike Monday." Specifically, some GPS systems were temporarily knocked offline. This caused intermittent connections and accuracy problems with "Real-Time Kinematic" (RTK) systems, which connect to John Deere "StarFire" receivers that are in modern tractors and agricultural equipment. RTK systems use GPS plus a stream of constantly-updating "correction" data from a fixed point on the ground to achieve centimeter-level positional accuracy for planting crops, tilling fields, spraying fertilizer and herbicide, etc.
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We wouldn't need so many toxic chemicals in farming if ... there were less humans.
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We wouldn't need so many toxic chemicals in farming if humans would have simply settled in a place and adapted local crops. The cat's out of the bag now and we have numerous invasive pest to deal with.
BULLSHIT. Plenty of actual organic farmers can succeed without that, so prove otherwise. Profit drives chemicals. Not necessity. Grow up.
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The land yield of an organic vs. non-organic farm is significantly less (~20%) and far less stable yearly, meaning you need approximately 50% more land if farmed organically for current outputs.
It simply does not scale unless you want to spend a lot more money on food.
And hey- if you do, that's no problem at all. That's what's great about a free market.
Re: more accuracy. (Score:2)
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Re:more accuracy. (Score:4, Insightful)
We wouldn't need so many toxic chemicals in farming if humans would have simply settled in a place and adapted local crops.
Sure if you're living in the stone age, but modern crops produce far more than anything "native" and without them we wouldn't be able to survive
I call bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
I strongly suspect that the reason has nothing to do with the solar flare and is instead caused by something like a failed software update.
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GPS or GLONASS satellites were largely unaffected by the flare. What happened was their differential GPS system (RTK) getting screwed up: https://landmarkimp.com/news/n... [landmarkimp.com] I strongly suspect that the reason has nothing to do with the solar flare and is instead caused by something like a failed software update.
Never let an opportunity to pass the blame pass. This is managerial training 101 right here. "No, we didn't have a problem with our systems. It was," googles electronic interference for date, "solar flares! Yeah, man. Solar flares. Whew."
Re:I call bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
The level of noise was fierce. The ham radio guys said that their usual communications bands were totally dead, with only transient levels of low-noise.
Any cheap freaking electronics were likely affected.
It has, therefore, everything to do with the solar flare and the atmospheric noise induced.
The satellites weren't affected, or you'd of heard the stories of thousands of Google Map deaths by leaps from a cliff, because Google Map lemmings will follow their maps hyper-religiously.
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Re:I call bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Uh, no.
There was broadband noise, pretty much DC-light+.
Tractors apparently have poor shielding.
All VHF+ signals are pretty much line of sight, with small amounts of multipath, which isn't corrected in GPS, unlike say, WiFi.
If someone is shouting in your ear, you can't hear whispers from far away. Shielding does a good job of reducing induced interference. Bad shielding/poor earth reference does not.
Where the ambient random field intensity is high, it deafens reception, the ability to discriminate signal from noise thus thwarted. There are great websites dedicated to electrical space weather, with historical data, if you want to purse the actual research. Ham radio, military, and other heavy communications users live by their forecasts.
Re:I call bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
GPS and "differential GPS" are two different systems. GPS gives you an absolutely location, differential GPS sits on the ground in a known position, looks at GPS, assumes any differences between the known position and GPS are errors in GPS, and sends a correction signal directly to the user end item. "I am here, GPS says I am there, the difference is an error, you probably have the same error, so correct your position by the amount I am off"
It counts on the resolution of GPS to be extremely high, but considers that the absolute position to be off by whatever the error spec might be. So, GPS is the space system and receivers. Differential GPS is a ground system to correct the absolute position error in the civilian GPS.
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Anyway, how hard is it going to be for farmers to find grown up crops in their field? Hey look! We have a bunch of grown up corn here in our field but the GPS doesn't mention it! What should we do, phone John Deere to ask maybe?
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> Tractors apparently have poor shielding
By its very nature, its difficult if not totally redundant to sheild an antenna.
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No, but its signal along its tuned length indeed is. Read about Maxwell. Any piece of wire is an antenna.... until it isn't.
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The level of noise was fierce. The ham radio guys said that their usual communications bands were totally dead, with only transient levels of low-noise.
Any cheap freaking electronics were likely affected.
It has, therefore, everything to do with the solar flare and the atmospheric noise induced.
The satellites weren't affected, or you'd of heard the stories of thousands of Google Map deaths by leaps from a cliff, because Google Map lemmings will follow their maps hyper-religiously.
Yes, it was a typical knockout punch to RF.
Wondering why GPS was knocked out, I'm pretty certain that the Real Time Kinematic was the culprit. Exactly what the use case is that requires a weak link in the GPS chain is, I'm not certain. It seems that a pretty intelligent system could be made that only uses GPS, unless the farmers need millimeter precision - and I kind doubt they do.
RF is an unruly beast, and if disaster awaits unless all signal paths are perfect, perhaps you gonna learn today, John Dee
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You need the delta from three sats to make their receivers work. If one is weak, then exact positioning delta could trigger a software fault.
With all that noise.... acquiring and holding was probably the big problem because the aperiodicity in locking three was likely a problem. That's my guess....
Add noisy CANbus noise, leaky alternators, attachments picking up actual ground bounce from the EMF, and it's a cesspool of signal problems.
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The weak link would be the transmission between the base station and the roving RTK units. Depending on the radio modem frequency that could easily be interfered with.
Farmers don't need millimeter or even centimeter precision, honestly. But what RTK does bring is repeatability. Being able to drive in the same track year on year (within an inch or two) is quite useful. and being able to accurately seed into a strip of tilled dirt, or seed between last year's rows.
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The weak link would be the transmission between the base station and the roving RTK units. Depending on the radio modem frequency that could easily be interfered with.
Farmers don't need millimeter or even centimeter precision, honestly. But what RTK does bring is repeatability. Being able to drive in the same track year on year (within an inch or two) is quite useful. and being able to accurately seed into a strip of tilled dirt, or seed between last year's rows.
Well then, either this is the price to pay, or their implementation is bad.
I lean toward the second. Modern engineering practices seem to think two things. That all radio frequencies are the same, and because of that, bandwidth is close to infinite.
They aren't, and it isn't. If your RTK system is built around frequencies that will be knocked out by solar storms, then it will be knocked out by solar storms.
The unfortunate part of this is that while it was going to happen, the previous 11 year solar cy
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I'm further north than just about all farmers in the US.
The lights were pretty fucking amazing, but the RF interference was not noticed in any system I regularly use.
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Like any CME landing, it's going to be random. I had aurora in the Midwest of the US, but commercial broadcast bands were fine, OTR TV was fine.
My ham radio friends were bummin'.
But I wasn't in a tractor in the middle of a field, either.
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But the timing signal from the GPS satellites doesn't appear to have been greatly impacted here, where my family lives in Oklahoma and Arkansas, or anywhere I can find on the news other than this story.
Perhaps it's just due to the nature of how many satellites are usually visible from different parts of the sky.
I think it's more likely that the particular system these tractors used was somehow more sensitive to what was go
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If you look at a pic of a CME, you'll see that it's asymmetrical, a random blob. The shape you see connotes it's irregular shape. It hurls through space not as a perfect ball, but instead, lands and charges the atmosphere at different rates.
The troposphere is a different shape depending on the time of day, and where the CME lands and charges the troposphere, and where the blob plops on earth. The variability rate is wide. The charge/discharge/absorption cycle is therefore variable as well, as though an irre
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I.e., it's hard to imagine there were any parts of the ionosphere more ionized than directly where I was standing in the lower 48 (I'm in Seattle, so there isn't really any further north one can really go in the lower 48)
There's no doubt that enough disruption could certainly affect your ab
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Yes, this is the summary so far, given the evidence. Different areas also have different atmospheric densities. It was quite a burst.
The tractor might've been just a big metal antenna with huge amounts of random goo charging it.
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Never let an opportunity to pass the blame pass. This is managerial training 101 right here. "No, we didn't have a problem with our systems. It was," googles electronic interference for date, "solar flares! Yeah, man. Solar flares. Whew."
No one passed the blame. The OP is illiterate and repeated what was said in a summary, while you just jumped on the opportunity to act like a useful idiot repeating some misinformation and blaming "managerial training".
The only question is, who is dumber, you or the OP?
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Never let an opportunity to pass the blame pass. This is managerial training 101 right here. "No, we didn't have a problem with our systems. It was," googles electronic interference for date, "solar flares! Yeah, man. Solar flares. Whew."
Google? GOOGLE? You don't have the BOFH excuse calendar open on your desk all set up to go? There's even several online ones if you prefer the pointy-clicky solution.
Incidentally, what was your username again?
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Never let an opportunity to pass the blame pass. This is managerial training 101 right here. "No, we didn't have a problem with our systems. It was," googles electronic interference for date, "solar flares! Yeah, man. Solar flares. Whew."
Google? GOOGLE? You don't have the BOFH excuse calendar open on your desk all set up to go? There's even several online ones if you prefer the pointy-clicky solution.
Incidentally, what was your username again?
I've had a BUNCH over the years. A bunch. Only the one now though.
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GPS or GLONASS satellites were largely unaffected by the flare. What happened was their differential GPS system (RTK) getting screwed up
I strongly suspect that the reason has nothing to do with the solar flare and is instead caused by something like a failed software update.
Normally biggest opportunity for uncorrected time of flight error in GPS systems is accounting for ionospheric conditions directly influenced by solar storms. Errors probably got to a point where the augmentation systems got confused.
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They advertise this as less a corrector and more as a range extender for areas where you can't pick up GPS directly due to obstructions. I really wouldn't count on them trying for anything too complex.
Re:I call bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
GPS signals are incredibly weak and barely above the noise floor. It takes a lot of software magic to make them usable.
Re:I call bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
> GPS or GLONASS satellites were largely unaffected by the flare. What happened was their differential GPS system (RTK) getting screwed up
So you're saying there was minimal issues with GPS, but the problem was with the GPS? Okay then.... "largely unaffected" is still a level of affected.
"To be clear, this isn't a problem with our RTK network. The RTK was affected more due to its ability to have more corrections and it is a higher accuracy system anyway. More corrections coming in that were âoebadâ created more inaccuracy than we saw in the other systems. The storm has affected all brands of GPS, not solely John Deere."
The storm interfered with the systems enough that the accuracy, which is within 6 to 9 inches for the majorly affected versions (StarFire 3000, 6000) and down to 1 inch for the higher spec systems (Starfire 7500), was affected enough that the automatic guidance systems on the tractors can't be trusted. These systems guide the tractors take so they can be driven over exactly the same path months later. The storm introduced variable and random errors into the measurements, meaning the path traced by the system is a wiggly line. If you tried to use the system during the storm there is zero chance you'll be able to trace the same path again, plus there could be large swaths of field missed because the tractor veered off course.
That's the problem; a radio interference issue, not a software issue.
=Smidge=
Re:I call bullshit (Score:5, Informative)
Which is kind of silly - I've worked with GPS-based systems before, and even built one from the ground up (software component only). The first thing I learned is to never trust a single data point, and to do rationality checks even across multiple points. It doesn't take much interference to make GPS tracks look very odd.
If you have an expected path and inertial systems for rationality checks, it isn't that difficult to correct for random errors... Maybe not to 1" accuracy, but it should be good enough you'd risk planting instead of leaving your tractors idle.
In fact, if I'd been working on a farming system I'd have been doing more than basic checks because there's always a risk of somebody thinking it would be funny (or profitable) for them to mess with your guidance system deliberately.
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GPS or GLONASS satellites were largely unaffected by the flare. What happened was their differential GPS system (RTK) getting screwed up
So it's bullshit and GPS is working fine it's just the GPS that is broken? Calm your autism. The reality is differential GPS is a form of GPS. Precisely no one has said that satellites were affected, you just assumed it. The summary even mentions RTK (which you clearly didn't bother to read since you called bullshit on the very thing you then proceeded to repeat).
Agreed. no problems on my farm. (Score:2)
Agreed. I had no problems with GPS signals in southern Alberta and we had amazing Northern Lights. Had full RTK the whole time. My RTCMv3 stream is coming from a local base station, broadcast no more than a few miles on 900 MHz. The big dealerships run their own base stations, and broadcast to the surrounding area on either 400 or 900 MHz bands. I can completely understand that interference made that signal break up 10-20 km out. Or maybe they are talking in the article about satellite-delivered correct
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There was a lot of Satellite stuff that got ganked. I work in AgTech (or whatever the marketing droids are calling it this week, Precision agriculture, etc etc etc). We'd already been having problems prior to this with some of our sensors being unable to report back regularly due to the Swarm satellite network having apparently been disrupted by earlier solar flare activity. We haven't assessed yet if this has made it worse, but we have been hearing reports about big holes appearing in that Starlink sensor
Re: I call bullshit (Score:2)
Also don't underestimate the risk of jamming the GPS signals: https://gpsjam.org/ [gpsjam.org]
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If you are already installing RTKs why not do UWB or something that way you don't have to rely on GPS.
UWB has a max range of, like, 200 meters.
Do you know how big Iowa cornfields are?
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There's already cell towers around in known positions. You don't even need a SIM card to identify the towers and look up their known locations. Triangulate from there. It wouldn't work everywhere but it has much better signal strength than GPS.
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Or, you know, use a lower frequency that gives you much further range with far less cost, and maybe, every 11 years or so, you may have to deal with a days disruption.
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If you are already installing RTKs why not do UWB or something that way you don't have to rely on GPS.
UWB has a max range of, like, 200 meters.
Do you know how big Iowa cornfields are?
They’re measured in football fields, so no longer than a game-winning Hawkeyes field goal attempt I’d imagine, b(I)ased on the incredible detective work of Ace Ventura of course.
https://youtu.be/Q9a-y7fj4Tg [youtu.be]
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GNSS systems do not achieve the accuracy needed here. They are targeting 1cm accuracy when planting and harvesting fields.
Bad Software (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the actual communication from John Deere: https://landmarkimp.com/news/n... [landmarkimp.com]
"Due to the way the RTK network works, the base stations were sending out corrections that have been affected by the geomagnetic storm and were causing drastic shifts in the field and even some heading changes that were drastic."
Read between the lines. This is a bug in their base stations' software.
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It's not a bug, it relies on RF signals that got disrupted and there's no simple patch that will fix it. It's a 1-2 day glitch, it will be OK again tomorrow, if it is not already.
Re:Bad Software (Score:5, Insightful)
True, it's not a bug that could easily be fixed. It seems more like a fundamentally flawed design. The system should not issue "drastic" corrections when it receives disrupted GPS information. Its job is to keep centimeter accuracy, not issue heading changes that send you into a ditch. Maybe this is the best they could do, but it seems like some error detection is in order.
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Sounds like a situation where you'd want to do:
IF abs(delta correction) > threshold THEN
ABORT!
If the system realises it's varying the correction so much that it has to be down to external interference, it should drop back to having a human decide whether to proceed. I'd guess whoever designed it presumed that the inputs were always going to be perfect.
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I think this has run its course, but *it is not getting "disrupted GPS information"*. It is getting interference in a separate radio frequency system that sits on the ground and send correction signals to make up for known errors that are always present in a straight civilian GPS signal.
This RF system is entirely separate from GPS, and in this case GPS was almost completely unaffected.
Re:Bad Software (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a bug in their base stations' software.
No not a bug. RF systems were affected and the nature of how it works means it can't be corrected for. Not just John Deer's RTK system was affected. It's a standard problem with RTK or any GNSS based system that attempts to achieve a 1cm accuracy. You didn't notice it because your phone's GPS already has rubbish accuracy so if it's out by 10cm you'd be none the wiser. If your system has 1cm accuracy on the other hand...
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Seriously?
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So, wait, are farmers no longer capable of driving the tractor manually?
Seriously?
Yes dude, that happened almost 20 years ago now.
Welcome to the future.
My robot lawn mower, which also uses RTK, refused to do its rounds this weekend. It was reporting a base station communication error.
It's worth pointing out that this mower was purchased explicitly for the feature of driving itself. It doesn't even have a handle to push it with. Shouldn't be too shocking a device not intended for human piloting can't be piloted by a human.
(Course I have far less consequences for leaving it sit for a fe
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Sort of like walking into an automated car factory and asking "are car makers no longer capable of making cars manually?"
They COULD drive them, but wouldn't get the accuracy required
Re:Bad Software (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't say incapable. But yes, farmers no longer do the bulk of the steering in a day. When you're operating a piece of machinery with a working width of 60' or greater, human ability to avoid overlapping or misses is just not there. Up to about 40' of working width you can use mechanical markers to reach out and mark the next pass. But as machines get wider, marking is impractical. GPS-driven steering has been one of the single biggest efficiency boosts in agriculture in decades. More accurate placement of fertilizer and herbicides reduces costs and also reduces damage and runoff from over application.
Most GPS systems now also offer automatic turning at the headlands. Can pick the machine up, make the turn, and drop it back in, exactly where it needs to be so that the row spacing is maintained. This is important for later machines that will come and cultivate, so as not to take out any plants (cultivator blight!).
Currently planting corn with a 40' high speed planter. There's no way I could drive that accurately at 10 mph by hand, but with the computer steering, we can knock out the acres and use the precise amount of seed that we planned.
Just like with cars, though, there are yet many things to overcome to make tractors completely autonomous. For now, just having the computer steer allows the operator to spend his time monitoring the machine, looking for issues. In fact I have one neighbor that has a bi-directional tractor. He plants potatoes with the cab facing backwards so the operator can keep a close watch on the planter without having to look over the shoulder all the time.
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Read between the lines. This is a bug in their base stations' software.
It was a G5 storm. Anyone having any technical issues, do they have “bugs” too? If so, we as a human race SUCK at failing to protect against this. Now, or ever.
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How many 9s do you need? One or two days of downtime every 20 years is a lot cheaper than zero.
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How many 9s do you need? One or two days of downtime every 20 years is a lot cheaper than zero.
How many 9s you ask? How about anywhere near the five 9s the salescritter was selling, in lieu of refunds.
20 years ago a planet measured its downtime revenue loss in days. Today it’s measured in minutes. I’d say a “lot cheaper” can be quite relative.
Why face problems later? (Score:5, Insightful)
Steer the harvester combine manually in the rows that were planted. When I was a teenager I helped my grandfather farm his 80 acre farm in Ohio. We planted in straight rows and harvested in straight rows. We didn't need no stinkin' GPS. Point the Oliver or Massey in that direction and go.
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Sounds like you need a job? They probs hiring now.
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I worked in IT for over 30 years. I'm not contributing to that dumbassery any longer. Tech companies ruined the dream.
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Steer the harvester combine manually in the rows that were planted.
Modern industrial farming is done to the almost 1cm accuracy. Steering a harvester manually results in significant crop damage compared to the standard of today.
When I was a teenager I helped my grandfather farm his 80 acre farm in Ohio.
When I was a teenager I had no internet, that doesn't mean the modern world economy functions without it. Farming today is *NOTHING* like what you remember.
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Steering a harvester manually results in significant crop damage compared to the standard of today.
If you can't manually keep a harvester lined up with the rows of corn you shouldn't be operating that equipment.
I don't know what kind of "crop damage' you think you're going to get from steering a harvester manually. Even if you're offset by 12"+ from the row the cornstalks are still going to get cut at basically the same height, and you're not going to see any difference in how many bushels of corn you get per acre. You can't really damage the crop since you're *HARVESTING* the crop at that point.
Way
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If you can't manually keep a harvester lined up with the rows of corn you shouldn't be operating that equipment.
No one can. That's the point. You don't understand the standards of modern day farming.
I don't know what kind of "crop damage' you think you're going to get from steering a harvester manually.
We're not planting crops in wide enough spaces for you to walk between. This isn't the 70s anymore. Modern farming attempts to use as much of the land as physically possible, and it's one of the reason it's so critical to load the soil full of fertiliser. The denser you plant, the more damage you get from any misalignment. About the only damage you get to any crop these days is what the wheels from your equipment hits. It
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JPL could recover from this (Score:2)
Remember when the capacitors failed on the phase-lock loops on Voyager and JPL came up with a way to compensate for Doppler shift with the tracking data so the loops didn't need a large capture range?
Are the software people at John Deere admitting they are not Real Programmers (there was an article back-in-the day that Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal that riffed off Real Men Don't Eat Quiche), that they can't back-calculate the amount of zig-zag and enter that as compensation in the cultivator and in t
Re:Why face problems later? (Score:5, Insightful)
Way to tell the world you don't understand modern farming without saying it. Guessing you have never tried to plant 24 rows...wait, I meant 36...wait I actually meant 48 rows at a time without GPS. Attempting to plant such large swaths without GPS is all but useless because there is no way you can look out and tell if your tractor is correct based upon the last pass. Then we can also talk about how important those planting records are when it comes to both insurance as well as analysis when you also bring in your harvesting records.
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Farmers mostly don't do anything now. If it wasn't for the failsafe safety mechanisms which require a human to be at the helm, newer tractors would be able to be 100% automated without a human (though even that may have changed in the past couple years). The farmer mostly sits in the air conditioned tractor and watches youtube and meme videos now.
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Ok, go easy on me guys. I was half-heartedly joking in my post. The last thing I want is a bunch of angry farmers coming at me with pitch forks! (Are pitch forks still a thing?)
Re:Why face problems later? (Score:4, Insightful)
We'll go easy as long as you promise to refrain from making such idiotic comments in the future. With the anti-intellectual stance we see from at least half the county, I don't really believe you when you say you were joking.
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Sorry dad.
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The last thing I want is a bunch of angry farmers coming at me with pitch forks! (Are pitch forks still a thing?)
No, they've been automated and replaced by angry robots that can stab a pitch fork with cm precision
New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg on farming (Score:2)
You dig a hole, (makes gesture) drop in the seed, cover it with dirt, water it and up comes the corn.
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Steer the harvester combine manually in the rows that were planted. When I was a teenager I helped my grandfather farm his 80 acre farm in Ohio. We planted in straight rows and harvested in straight rows. We didn't need no stinkin' GPS. Point the Oliver or Massey in that direction and go.
Those that debate whether or not “farmers” or “cowboys” are anything like they used to be, just ask them to do their job without GPS.
You’ll find your answer.
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Wasn't this the episode... (Score:3)
I'd instead say (Score:5, Informative)
"Farmer chooses method of equipment control vulnerable to new method of failure and discovers it"
If only there was a way to, I dunno, ... (Score:1)
... put a few dozen cameras on the tractors and have them "look around" then compare that to stored images.
Or ... "plant" permanent objects in the ground that the tractor can detect and compare to known maps. I'm thinking maybe something metal that's buried below root-depth.
Either or both of these combined with GPS, inertial tracking, and other existing technologies should do the trick.
The problem, of course, is cost.
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Or, you know, use a highly accurate and reliable technology, that may have known issues during times of extremely high solar activity, which only occur briefly evvery 11 years or so.
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Right.
My guess is that it costs more than a few days lost every decade or so (the last time I remember the northern lights coming this far south was well over a decade ago).
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We're gonna starve (Score:2)
Garage openers and a Pi seem to concur (Score:2)
I noticed that the range on my 433MHz garage door openers was substantially reduced Fri/Sat/Sun, but only during the day, during the night all was normal.
Also, a RaspberryPi (plastic case, unshielded) where I run a small home server 24x7 with great uptime kept locking up and requiring to be power-cycled on the same three days, but once again, only during the day.
YMMV, but that's what I observed from 29S 54W. (not able to check for aurora australis, as it was overcast and rainy the entire time)
Starfire uses atmospheric model (Score:2)
And No Right To Repair (r)(c) (Score:2)
Food shortages again!
Not just Solar Storms (Score:2)
Old tech is best (Score:2)
This reminds me of Clarksons overly high tech tractor and the hilarity of trying to use it, with all the resuing and other work done by good old dumb machines driven by someone who knows how to plough a feild.
With the right to repair scandals affecting thes high tech tractors, its well worth a farmers time to simply buy an old machine and maintain it. It's not like they havnt been doing that exact thing for dedaces.
How about a startup who can help you make hard to find parts, bespoke parts etc, on an ad-ho