I found a humorous article the other day on one Internet news service, which had to do with GPS and surprisingly enough farming. Now I say the article was humorous because for some reason (which I still can't figure out completely) some people think of farmers (and I think agriculture in general) as an occupation of those unable to get better jobs. The article was slanted towards those who know nothing about agriculture and how if more of these backward farmers would embrace technology they could feed more people. Alas, I have diverted from the subject and lets get back to the role GPS will play in the future of agriculture.
The use of GPS is the latest incarnation of a gradual and deliberate progression on the part of farmers to become more productive. Many many generations ago, a farm would select the area they wanted to plant, fertilize and till it by hand then harvest the crop grown when it was ready. This was not overly efficient and very labour intensive. Overtime we began to incorporate livestock into our field preparation and the power source and more recently mechanical help. Jump forward to 2003 and the ability to physically prepare a field for planting and harvesting the grown crop is no longer the limiting factor it once was. Instead, we are now faced with the bigger problem of producing more yields per unit area we harvest. In other words, how can we grow more on every shrinking farmland?
The use of GPS systems is one tool that modern farmers have to utilize their land more efficiently. Most commonly associated with the military, GPS's ability to accurately tell you where you are anywhere in the world can also provide the modern farmer with equally valuable information. On the battlefield, GPS eliminates the need for landmarks and transforms the world into essentially an imaginary grid. Simply put, if you are standing at point a which is at such and such coordinates and you want to reach point b. The GPS device will enable you to determine that if you walk for 6 miles in direction c you will reach your goal. For the soldier, GPS allows them to know where they are, where their friends are and where they are going. This allows thousands of soldiers to move around a desert for example effectively.
Most farmers have no idea where they are in any given field. Farmers deal with acres or hectares and in many cases hundreds of acres at once. They simple have no easy way to measure their position within a field. GPS is one way too fairly accurate determine where you are. Why is this important to the modern farmer?
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