In modern agriculture, the use of precision technology is no longer the privilege of the happy few. From small to large scale farming across the globe, help from the universe is widely accepted. How geospatial tech is transforming agriculture, from soil to satellite.
By Heiko Lohre
Senior manager emerging business development, Topcon
Precision technology has significant potential to make life easier for farmers, helping them overcome market challenges by working smarter across all of their operations. The industry has a lot to contend with: input costs, while declining, haven’t returned to their baseline before the energy price spike; pressure to sustainably deliver higher yields and feed a growing population also remains significant.
And then there’s tightening environmental regulations. In short, farmers need to do more with less.
To stay competitive, farms of all sizes are turning to geospatial technologies to find gains in efficiency, productivity, and sustainability that will help them meet these challenges. Tools powered by Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) positioning, and high-resolution aerial or satellite imagery are helping farmers map their fields with pinpoint accuracy and make real-time, data-driven decisions about soil, crops, and resources.
For both individual farms and the sector as a whole, these technologies are making a big difference. But to realize their full potential, adoption must be widespread, supported by smart data sharing policies and proactive collaboration between manufacturers, policymakers and farmers.
Enabling progress
Farmers have always relied on lessons from previous seasons. Today, precision agriculture lets farmers dig deeper than ever, combining historical crop data with real-time performance indicators that allow farmers to go into the following year armed with the full picture.
Crop health monitoring solutions such as CropSpec measure plant reflectance to determine chlorophyl content and nitrogen concentration, and feed this data back into detailed field maps that allow farmers to know exactly what their crops need and when. Combined with yield monitoring tools, the technology adds empirical data to the experience of farmers who are finetuning their plans, while simultaneously enabling them to act quickly when the unexpected happens.
Upping accuracy
Guidance systems powered by high-accuracy GNSS signals and supported by RTK correction have redefined what precision means for machinery including tractors, sprayers, spreaders and harvesters. Using services like Topnet Live, farmers can simultaneously access the survey-grade accuracy of high-precision RTK correction with the broad and consistent coverage of precise point positioning (PPP) networks, meaning wherever they are, their machines will stay connected regardless of the available local networks.
In the cab, data from these guidance systems feeds position-based steering systems to enable more accurate work in the field. The latest solutions offer different guidance patterns to fit the job at hand, and farmers can view multiple guidance paths from different machines working simultaneously, helping everyone pull in the same direction.
Value Line is an autosteering solution that enables farms of all sizes to make the sorts of marginal gains that make all the difference in a difficult market. For smaller operations such as family farms, consistently eliminating just a foot of overlap is hugely significant. For example, a one-foot overlap from a 100-foot cultivator in a large farm is a wastage of one per cent. At a smaller scale, a one-foot overlap on a 30-foot cultivator results in a three per cent wastage: a significant loss for any business. While similar savings may seem less important on a larger farm, there are serious economies of scale to be had when this technology is embraced across numerous machines.
These services are most effective when used with farm management software such as TAP. The platform brings together insights from across a farmer’s operations, giving them a broad but detailed view of what’s going on and highlighting opportunities to reduce input usage and increase efficiency and productivity. The end result is a smarter way of working that allows farmers to react faster and more effectively to whatever the season throws their way.
Sharing is caring
Advances in geospatial technology have come in tandem with a boom in data availability. As GNSS coverage comes to more regional markets with increasingly competitive pricing, more farmers can leverage geospatial data to upgrade their operations. The opportunity is bigger than simply improving the accuracy and efficiency of individual farms; by putting their heads and their data together, farmers, policymakers, and manufacturers can build a smarter global farming industry.
With the support of a robust and realistic data-sharing agreement, farmers can pool information such as yield data, soil conditions, and crop performance, enabling everyone to make better decisions in a better-connected sector. A new UN report gives one example of how this could work, promoting the idea of a centralized UN imagery procurement hub for satellite outputs.
This allows farmers around the world to tap into the power of geospatial tech, no matter where they’re working. Similar efforts are also underway in the EU, where the European Commission is invested in driving digitalization of agriculture across the bloc. This includes bringing together several key players from across the industry to create a EU Code of Conduct for agricultural data sharing. The rollout of the Common European Agricultural Data Space in 2024 was another significant step forwards, but farmers also need support to adopt and get up to speed with the technology.
A stronger status quo
Agriculture is under unique pressure right now, as macroeconomic conditions, sustainability regulations and a growing population come together to demand more from farmers. With the help of precision technology farmers can build a more efficient, adaptive, and resilient baseline. The next era of agriculture will be digitally driven and data informed.
