GPSr in agriculture

[fugglefeet]

Hi all,

One of the least likely places to find GPS technology and yet a very important use in increasing crop yields. I had the honours of having to work in Ventersdorp yesterday and saw these two units at the local agent. If you look carefully at the picture in front of the bottom unit's cab is a white dome (which I suspect is the GPS unit) which helps with the distribution of fertilisers, seeds and pesticides with pinpoint accuracy.

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Agriculture is not trailing far behind with GPS use and technology.

Darryl

[Leon Jr]

Very interesting field of GPS

see this :

Agriculture : http://www.trimble.com/Agriculture/index.aspx
Construction : http://construction.trimble.com/product ... ne-control

How I love my work!

[fugglefeet]

Hi Leon,

Great information and it's nice to see GPS technology filtering into other avenues aside from just hiking, getting there and plain sailing. Trimble are to my knowledge the leaders in the field of agricultural and construction GPS technologies. The nice part is that this technology can be retrofitted to existing equipment if and when the need arises.

While I took these photos the rep also told me that there was a combine harvester that did crop sampling on the fly and recorded the all aspects of the crop (ie. seed population per hectare, moisture content in the sample, etc.) with geo-tagging for later analysis. Much like the Trimble system (obviously CASE's version and branding).

Darryl