WALSTONS GPS COMES GOOD
30 April 1999
WALSTONS GPS COMES GOOD
After all manner of trials and
tribulations, Oliver Walston
ends his three-part Precision
Farming saga on a high note
THE last of these articles ended with me quivering with excitement as I waited for Soyls quad bike to appear on the farm and start taking soil samples. The appointed day dawned fine and the quad bike duly appeared on a trailer behind a Vauxhall Vectra. I watched with ill-concealed excitement as the operator set up his satellite navigation antenna, booted up his laptop computer and disappeared off across the stubble to start taking the first of his umpteen samples.
It only took him a morning to cover eighty hectares, and all he had to show for it was a plastic bag full of soil samples and a laptop full of data. After this exciting moment weeks passed during which I heard nothing. Eventually I received through the post a computer disc with instructions on how to transfer this data onto our Farmade mapping programme.
Now I yield to nobody in my enthusiasm for computers, but I was completely flummoxed by the instructions. This was without any doubt the least friendly software I had ever used and after a mornings frustration I eventually gave up. No problem, said Simon Parrington of Soyl, he would transfer all the data onto a PCMCIA card and our LH Agro hardware on the Bredal spreader would be able to do the rest. Or so he said. It all sounded so convincing but by now I was becoming cynical.
* Beautiful maps
A week later Simon Parrington turned up in the farm office, armed with a fistful of beautiful maps displaying the phosphate and potash levels in glorious Technicolor. The problem was that they showed absolutely no similarity to the yield maps which the combine had produced last harvest.
But there was no time for such details because we were already way behind schedule for base fertiliser spreading. Soyl had not just provided us with maps; they had also worked out how much P and K we would need for next years cropping.
Thus for the first time in nearly thirty years I found myself ordering straights instead of blends from my friendly local fertiliser supplier. In the meantime LH Agro turned up to fit the necessary hardware to the tractor, including a satellite receiver and the computer control box for the spreader.
And that is where the problems began. For the past 10 years we had used our Bredal spreader very effectively. Armed with a weighbridge and an instinctive feel for machinery, Ted King invariably managed to get our application rates to within a few kilos per hectare of the target figure. This year he returned from his first load looking miserable. It appeared that the new hardware, which dispensed with the old landwheel drive, meant that the traditional settings were wrong. Very wrong indeed.
A week later, after many experiments, there was a smile on Teds face. He had worked out the new settings and was now less than one kilo per hectare off target, which is as good as one could possibly expect. What was even better was that the GPS system was working perfectly so that in some parts of the field the spreader stopped completely whilst at other locations it was putting on very great quantities.
* Eerie feeling
The realisation that the machine was not being controlled by Ted but by a computer and a satellite gave us an eerie feeling. It was almost as if we had peered into the future and had caught a fleeting glimpse of how farming would be done by the next generation.
So was it all worthwhile? After a few nervous moments in the autumn, there could be no doubt that the experiment had been a total success. Using our existing machines we had succeeded in applying variable rates of fertiliser based on extremely detailed soil samples. The hardware is available and can be bolted onto existing tackle and the actual control mechanism can be operated by a skilled tractor driver.
The mapping software, however, is more of a problem, and should really only be used by experts who know exactly what they are doing. The day will, however, eventually come when even a dumb farmer like me can work it, but today this would be unwise.
The combine yield-mapping information is, I am forced to admit, a bit of a luxury. The maps may be pretty but it is hard to see what to do with the information they contain. The soil analysis maps are, however, absolutely wonderful and make Precision Farming totally worthwhile. Two generations ago my fathers farm workers dumped heaps of manure of a field exactly one chain apart; these were then spread by hand. Years later I discovered the joys of soil analysis and applied the fertiliser at different rates on different fields. This is good news for me because I save money, and it is good news for the environment because we no longer spread the stuff all over the countryside.
Precision Farming may have started slowly but it is here to stay. I cant wait for next autumn when we start spreading again.