The adoption of GPS in Cropping Agriculture



GPS adoption in practice.
As we mentioned earlier in the article, within a given crop region the adoption of new technology is generally attempted first by a relatively small group of progressive growers. The main body of growers wait until the technology is proven to have benefit by the progressive group before adopting it themselves.

Obviously the choice of approach by the leading growers in a given area will have a significant impact on the overall adoption pattern. For example, in Australian cotton the majority of the progressive growers engaged in Changing Practice by adopting Control Traffic. The consequence for the GPS supply chain was a concentration of dual frequency GPS RTK auto-steering systems. This pattern was consistently repeated by the mainstream growers once data was produced showing both improved operating efficiency and farm productivity. Today the vast majority of cotton properties in Australia are using such technology.

In another example, progressive broad acre wheat growers in Canada tended to initially adopt an approach to reduce errors. As a consequence relatively low cost visual guidance systems are very common in that sector. By comparison, a significant number of progressive growers involved in broad acre wheat production in Western Australia have adopted a change in practice called zero till. This has led to a larger proportion of auto-steering systems being purchased as opposed to visual guidance.

To continue the examples, in some parts of the Queensland (Australia) sugar industry yield mapping and variable rate control (Improved Agronomy) are popular and 500Km further up the coast growers are buying sub-inch Auto-steer.

It does seem from these examples that the initial choice of the leading growers has a significant impact on GPS adoption in any given geographical area.

The GPS supply chain
As the different approaches to Precision Farming have evolved so the GPS Supply chain has produced products to satisfy the need. Many of the manufacturers started serving one particular approach and have subsequently increased their product lines to meet the demands of one or two other sides of the triangle.

A consequence of this great variety of products is that as the grower adopts more of the PF approaches (other sides of the triangle) he is often faced with interfacing different products from different vendors and compatibility becomes an issue.
v Interoperability
Interoperability is defined as “the ability of hardware and software on different machines from different vendors to share data” and is an important concept for any grower thinking of buying GPS products.

Interoperability makes it easy to pick and choose the best products from a range of manufactures with the confidence that they will work together. The computer industry is fully interoperable, you can choose any combination of PC, printers, keyboards and mice and they will all work together. This also future proofs your purchase because you can upgrade parts of your system at different times

Let’s use the example of buying an auto-steer and a GPS reference station which you want to use together to achieve 2cm accurate steering. If you buy them from the same manufacturer you would reasonably expect them to work together. However if they use a proprietary communications interface they will not work with any other manufacturers equipment and are therefore not considered interoperable.

If you buy the GPS reference station from one manufacturer and the auto-steer from a second and they use a published open standard to communicate with each other, they are interoperable. Interoperability depends on open standards such as exist in the computer industry. Such standards do exist for GPS and further standards are under development for agricultural electronics.

Open Standards
Many non-agricultural industries use interoperable GPS on a frequent basis. Indeed in some markets such as offshore oil exploration any product which is not fully interoperable is simply not acceptable and will not be purchased. The key point here is that many of the GPS manufactures supply product into both marine markets and agriculture so their products already have these standards within them.

RTCM and NMEA are two open data formats which are widely used in GPS applications and will be familiar to many people reading this paper. Although widely promoted in many industries they remain relatively unknown within agriculture.

Other industries which have defined a number of open standards are those who use Geographical Information Systems (GIS). The standards here tend to be around map data and are therefore of direct relevance to many of the products used in agriculture. Two of the most common map standards are ESRI Shape and GeoTIFF. Both these started life as manufacturers proprietary formats but were subsequently published and became “open”. These map formats are often used to get different map data sources into farm management software.

The agricultural industry is itself developing an open standard for connecting electronics. The ISO11783 standard allows electronics from different manufacturers to communicate via a Controller Area Network (CAN) usually referred to as a CAN Bus. This requires a physical connection between devices. ISO11783 will become more and more common on agricultural machinery in coming years.

All these standards can be found in many GPS Precision Farming products today. The decision to market the availability and benefits of open standards is often down to each of the vendors.

Conclusions
The use of GPS in Precision Farming has been a long and hard road for manufacturers, dealers and growers. After many years of product improvements and learning how to effectively apply the technology, real benefits in terms of both operating efficiency and farm productivity can now be demonstrated for a large number of crop sectors.
v It is important for the GPS community to understand that in practice the term Precision Farming means different thing to different growers. Depending on whether the growers initial focus is on reducing error, improving agronomy or changing farm practice significantly changes the economics of their decision making and hence the product mix they are likely to purchase.

Leading growers in each crop growing region tend to heavily influence the purchasing decisions of following growers. Trying to promote “top of the range” auto-steer in an area where only the economics of reducing error have been proven is certainly an uphill task.

Experience has shown that with time and patience the farming community will experiment with and adopt more and more aspects of the complete Precision Farming mix and so continue to improve their overall competitive position.

Interoperability will become an increasingly important topic within Precision Farming as more sides of the triangle are adopted by farmers. Much education remains to be done in this area within farming communities.

Improving our knowledge of the adoption process can help ensure that the right products are available to the right growers in the right area at the right time. When the economics are proven the adoption process is quicker benefiting not only the individual growers and the GPS supply chain but as operating efficiencies and farm productivity improve the wider economy benefits as well.

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