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Science Technology

GPS Meets Agriculture for Precision Farming 167

Posted by Hemos from the put-the-seed-at-31'-02-29-43 dept.
mskfisher writes "NASA Science News is reporting a story on a NASA project called Ag20/20, which involves farmers using GPS-aided crop and field analysis to improve accuracy and yields. Instead of blanketing the whole area with a set level of pesticide or fertilizer, they can now vary it via computer, based on IR and soil data gathered from aircraft, satellites, and tractor-mounted sensors."
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GPS Meets Agriculture for Precision Farming More

GPS Meets Agriculture for Precision Farming

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  • Satisfied, he'll glance around his burgeoning field. "But wait," he wonders, suddenly puzzled, "where did my dog go?" Fingers snap. "I must've forgot his GPS collar again!"

    That's not the farmer's problem; he's just behind the times.

    A real precision farmer would have an AIBO.
    • Satisfied, he'll glance around his burgeoning field. "But wait," he wonders, suddenly puzzled, "where did my dog go?" Fingers snap. "I must've forgot his GPS collar again!"

      GPS jewels could be useful for (say) your girlfriend. Imagine, you go with her to the shopping center and suddenly you realize that she's gone somewhere else while you were looking at (say) computer games. Hence, you fire up your GPS reciver and trace your girlfriend in the shopping center :)


    • Land mine clearing is a tedious and extremely dangerous job. Everyday there are people being blown up, when trying to clearing up land-mines.

      Since GPS has the whole world covered, and many "birds" (satellites) are flying over us are equipped with precision lenses, then... why don't we some how use the GPS precision measuring technique, along with the robo-mine-clearer, and start automate the land-mine clearing job ?

      Although agriculture is important, if the land is mined, performing agricultural works on the land will be VERY DANGEROUS.

      I sincerely hope NASA and /or any UN related agency / agencies come up with ways to utilize GPS in clearing up the tens of millions of land mines still buried in many unmarked land, throughout the world.
  • ...don't we already pay American farmers enough to not produce/sell crops?

    • This will let us pay more farmers not to grow crops so they don't have to sell their farms to big corporations or turn them into housing developments.
      • This will let us pay more farmers not to grow crops so they don't have to sell their farms to big corporations or turn them into housing developments.

        That's a nice theory but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. About the only farms that get substancial government subsidies are wheat, corn, and other grain farms. Almost all of the subsidies go to huge corporate farms (who do you think can afford all of those lobbiests anyway?). And most of the subsidies go to areas where you're not going to have a huge amount of success building another housing development.

        On the other hand, the smaller, family-owned farms are often closer to cities (under a much greater tax pressure and regulation pressure to sell to a developer), selling crops that don't get subsidies (fruits and vegetables) , and, usually, subsidizing thier lifestyle with at least one other full time job. Check out Montgomory Co in MD or the Willamette Valley in OR for an idea on what the few remaining family farms look like.

        I'm not opposed to farming subsidies, but subsidies as they currently exists don't do anything that their supporters CLAIM that they do.

    • Not no but hell know. Farmers are so grossly underpaid that many of them have no choice but to sell out to a corporation farm. Come here to KS during harvest and go to the co-op and find out how much they are paying for a bushell of wheat and ask any farmer dropping off about how much it cost him to grow that same bushell.

      Farmers are GROSSLY under-paid and under-apriciated

      Where the hell do you think all that food you eat comes from, the sky?
      • Farmers are so grossly underpaid that many of them have no choice but to sell out to a corporation farm.

        Maybe that's just the natural economic result of modern technology. Ever since Henry Ford came along, very few cars have been handcrafted by individual proprietors. If such a crafstman tried to compete on price with major manufacturers, they would be grossly underpaid. Why would food be any different?

        • That depends on whether the good is a commodity or not. Food, for the most part, is. If you're a wheat farmer and that's all you know/are willing to learn as a trade, then don't be too surprised when you're screwed.

          Compare/contrast with the wine industry, which tends to be somewhere between a Monopolistic Competition/Oligopoly-type scenario, precisely because there is a discernable difference between wines (and most of those that consume wine care about that difference). As a result, you can still get away with JUST being a winery. I don't know why anyone expects to be able to get a decent living with being just a crop farmer. You CAN survive by living off the land, but you can only make money at it if you have serious economies of scale. Unless you have something to differentiate you from those that do, you die. That's the nature of Capitalism.

          What bothers me isn't that farmers are getting paid not to farm, it's that there's no good way to get farmers to do something else with some of their time (to make real $) without prying them from their ancestral homes. In this age where the potential of remote work is so real (ask the many companies that are having their employees work from home), why can't we retrain farmers to telecommute part time?
    • It would help if the value of grain by the bushel had ever increased.

      Right now the price of Hard Red Winter Wheat is the same per bushel as it was in 1902.

      Meanwhile, the cost of a tractor or a harvester has increased by about 10,000 percent.

      Actually, the amount of money paid American farmers isn't that much, and it keeps farms from going under and being turned into range land or housing developments.

      It helps keep the price of bread at the store the same decade after decade.

      • Re:Well, sure, it's cool, but... (Score:4, Informative)

        by SnapShot ( 171582 ) on Friday March 01, 2002 @09:36AM (#3089566)
        * The cost of the tractor per bushel has plummeted (how many acres could you seed, plow, etc. with that tractor in 1902)
        * And the cost of labor per bushel has plummeted (how many people did it take to harvest a bushel in 1902)
        * And the yield per acre as shot up (if they haven't then I guess Monsanto hasn't been doing their job)

        Like every other industry, farming benefits from efficiencies of scale.

        I am the last person on earth to want to see farm land turned into housing developments, but try not to be so simplistic that you insult your readers.
        • While you are partially correct, there is a lot of information you aren't privvy to, aparently.

          While tractors are more efficient now, they aren't efficient enough to make up the difference in cost. And besides, the only time that efficiency counts, is when the farmer gets more land. If a farmer's family had 200 acres in 1902, and still has 200 acres now, efficiency doesn't change. That $7,000 grain harvester (combine) puchased in 1902 does the same ammount of work as that quarter-million dollar 2002 model combine.

          The cost of labor per bushel has NOT plummeted. Sure it takes less people now, but the labor of each person costs more. Legally, farmers can't pay somebody $5/hr to work on their farms. They have to pay minimum wage, unemployment, etc... just as the large corporations do. There is a little bit of leeway, but not that much. Even to hire a "temp" worker from a staffing agency at $6/hr costs the farmer from $12-$16 per hour.

          And yeild per acre has gone up, yes. But not in reality. When a farmer has water rights for their farm, that is based on the "waterable" land when the original water rights were assigned. Out of 200 acres, maybe only 150 acres has official water rights, depending on the layout of the land (water won't travel up hill.) With newer technologies, such as sprinkler irrigation systems, the farmer has been able to farm all 200 acres. BUT, now the farmer is getting fined for using too much water, even though the watering method is more efficient. In a sense, too much of their land is receiving water, even though their total water usage has gone down.

          I am not pulling this information out of a newspaper article I have read somewhere. My parents and grandparents, and generations before them, are and were farmers. My dad complains about tractor cost (and repair costs are another can of worms,) labor cost, and the fines they are being charged for trying to make better use of their land. As a result, farmers are leaving more of their land dormant, just so they don't have to pay the fines.

          I know the reality of the farmers' financial situation. That is why I chose not to carry on the family tradition, as are many other people. The large corporate farmers are making quite a bit of money, the small family farms are not. And I don't know of any farmer in my area that has received a "bonus" or supplement from the government for being a farmer. Not a one.

          I did read an article a while back that had some numbers. For that $1.50 loaf of bread you buy in the store, about $.03 of that is paid to the farmer for his work. There were similar rates of inflation for eggs, milk, vegetables, etc. A lot of this is caused by the amount of goods we import from other countries. They can offer it to the US cheaper because they aren't under a lot of restrictions, such as chemicals, and can get what is banned in the USA cheaper than what we can use. NAFTA only opened this gap even more.

          With all of the propaganda being spread about how much farmers make, I'm not surprised how many people think farmers are rich. Sickened, but not surprised. Ask yourself this question: Would you work from 3:00 in the morning to 10:00 at night during the spring/summer/fall seasons for just enough wages to pay your bills and eat? That is what a family farmer in the United States does. And the winter that most people think farmers have off? That is spent repairing machinery that has worn and/or broken down during the farm season. Most farmers do more work in a month than most people will do in a lifetime. That is their choice, don't get me wrong, but the least we can do is thank them, and show them the respect they deserve, not sit around and complain about how much money you think they make.

          Again, thank a farmer 3 times a day. Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. And when a slow-moving implement slows you down on the way to watch a movie, remind yourself that rather than honking and flipping him off, you should wave at him and smile on the way by, because if he weren't doing that, you would be out in your garden growing your food instead of watching that movie.
          • I know the reality of the farmers' financial situation. That is why I chose not to carry on the family tradition, as are many other people. The large corporate farmers are making quite a bit of money, the small family farms are not. And I don't know of any farmer in my area that has received a "bonus" or supplement from the government for being a farmer. Not a one.

            Other than the "American Patriot" rhetoric at the end of your post (farmers, as a whole, aren't any better people or harder working than your computer programmers, doctors, taxi drivers, carpenters, or McD's counter person, so save the sob story) I agree wholeheartedly with your post. I'm not against farms (especially family ones) but I am against simplistic statments that we are supposed to take at face value.

            What it really boils down to is this: congress wraps their farm-aid bills in the rhetoric of the family farm when you know and I know that the subsidies are going to a few huge corporate farms that have the money to hire lobbiests.

            Add this to the fact that farming benefits from economies of scale (sorry to repeat myself). Your family farmer has a few options:

            1. push for a socialist government like France's that is willing to ignore the realities of capitalism in exchange for allowing the family farmer to exist or
            2. expand until you have the land and resources to compete in a capitalist society (including the cost of purchasing your very own senator so you can get subsidies and avoid regulation) or
            3. sell out or
            4. find a small niche market that is approriate to the environment of your farm (if you only have 200 acres and you don't have enough water rights you are too small to plant corn, try growing Agave cactus for tequila or something...)
            • Other than the "American Patriot" rhetoric at the end of your post

              Sorry, this is one subject I get carried away with. I didn't mean for it to sound like farmers are "better" than anyone else, but I would challenge most anyone who thinks their tech job is hard work to try farming for a year. I work at a large PC factory as an engineer, and have to remind myself on a constant basis that as hard as it may seem, it is still easier than moving sprinkler pipe and worrying about whether to buy crop insurance or fertilizer. :-) But it is a different work, not necessarily a harder work. More mental/stress vs. physical.

              I feel I have a fairly good handle on the issue as I have been on the farming side of the fence. My "American Patriot" rhetoric comes from hearing too many people making comments such as "Lazy farmers sitting in an air-conditioned tractor cab all day..." when they have absolutely no clue beyond their window-sill garden they grow a couple of stalks of sweet corn in. I guess I forget a lot that there are people in this world who DO have a clue and research, and more importantly understand, what they are talking about.

              Thank you for responding intelligently rather than flaming me for my little rant. If there were more people like you making comments, I don't think I would go off on rants like that as often.

              Take it easy,

              Jeremy

  • Farming for silver?
  • They've been doing this sort of thing for YEARS now.
    • All the ludites in the farm industry are now out of business? My neighbor has been using GPS to record production when he harvests and uses the data to adjust the amount of fertilizer the following year. The adjustment is done in real time; he just has to drive the equipment like he always has.


      Farming is tough business. Its a high tech world--if you don't take every advantage of technology you can, you'll loose the farm in short order to someone who will.

    • I can confirm that my parents' friends, who are farmers, were using GPS in 1994 for this purpose. They had data collectors in combines, and he had to have an external PCMCIA reader hooked to his PC to read the data. (I used to live in Stuttgart, Arkansas, Rice Capital of the World.)
    • Discover or Popular Mechanics or some magazine had an article on this in 1994 also, right after .mil removed the accuracy restrictions on civilian GPS receivers.

  • What I wonder is... (Score:4, Funny)

    by FakePlasticDubya ( 472427 ) on Thursday February 28, 2002 @09:02PM (#3088017) Homepage
    Will this improve the quality of crop circles?

  • Hardly original (Score:5, Informative)

    by MiTEG ( 234467 ) on Thursday February 28, 2002 @09:03PM (#3088024) Homepage Journal
    This is hardly original. A simple google search [google.com] and one of the more interesting results here [mandakzerotill.org]

    From the article:
    Indeed, perhaps only a decade or so hence, Isbell will climb down from his tractor holding a palm-sized computer in direct contact with Earth orbiting satellites.

    John Deere [deere.com] is already selling GPS-receiver equipped tractors (marketed as "StarFire receivers") that look about the size of a palm.

    • Re:Hardly original (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I agree, this has been done for years now. It's often called "precision farming." You can find a lot of info about it at, oddly enough, http://www.precisionfarming.com [precisionfarming.com].

    • Yup (Score:3, Informative)

      by wiredog ( 43288 )
      At least since the late 80's. I used to read some surveyor/gps magazines (like GPS World) back then, my father is in the remote sensing field, and this sort of thing used to be reported on monthly. I remember one article where the farmer used DEM type maps, ArcView, a WADGPS system for accurate placement, and a Newton (remember those) for data collection.
    • Caterpillar also are releasing GPS navigation and guidance as a factory fitted option in their Challenger MT700 [cat.com] series of agricultural tractors.
    • "John Deere [deere.com] is already selling GPS-receiver equipped tractors..."

      And Case-IH has been selling "precision farming" systems for years.
    • Wasn't that what GreenStar and InFielder were all about? Nice to see that Slashdot has caught up with early 90's AgTechnology.

      Just because we live in the Heartland doesn't make us Technological Morons.
    • Read more about some new GPS-equipped tractors in an article from the January Progressive Farmer, "Deere Leaps Into Autosteer [progressivefarmer.com]."

      Excerpt:
      "The farmers most likely to buy AutoTrac are those with large operations that require many field passes...

      "Initially, [Deere] doesn't expect that will include a lot of row-crop applications. But it will include farmers who use wide tillage equipment or air seeders and farmers who have crops such as cotton that require a lot of field work.

      "Like retrofit autosteer systems that have been on the market for a few years, Deere's AutoTrac relies on positioning information from satellites. Onboard computers process that information and use it to electronically steer...

      "[How it works]...an operator makes an initial pass in a field as a computer records position information. The driver then turns the tractor at the headland, a computer screen helps him "acquire" a new parallel row and--at the push of a button--the computer takes control of the steering. The driver doesn't have to touch the steering wheel until he turns the tractor at the end of the new row....

      "Deere's AutoTrac gets its 10-centimeter accuracy from the company's StarFire network, which uses multiple ground stations, computers and relay satellites to send positioning corrections to customers anywhere in North America."
    • ok but for someone like me who never really considered this it is still interesting :)

  • But the most important thing is... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gartogg ( 317481 ) <DavidsFullNameNO@SPAMgoogle.email> on Thursday February 28, 2002 @09:05PM (#3088031) Homepage Journal
    the fact that satelite usage is now cheap enough to make this cost effective.

    We complain that space is not being pushed enough, and THIS is what will make people invest in NASA's technology. Whenever the demand exists for a product, the market finds a way to deliver it as cheaply as possible, in order to maximize profit margins. This is the technology that will enable the space industry to bring the cost per pound of lifting stuff down.

    Of all of the space stories in the past year that I have seen on /., this is the one that makes me most optimistic about the space program.

    The only part that worries me is that there are not enough satelites to fill current demand, so planes are being used instead as the inferior alternative.

    "Satellite images, which require more time to downlink and process, can take from 2 to 7 days to reach a farmer.

    Such delays won't be a problem forever, though. 'Technology is advancing quickly and more of these commercial satellites are being launched each year,' he added."
    • Affordable.... Not likely for everyday farmers. For things like government agricultural departments, working with remote sensing peoples (people like surveying departments or should that be geomatic?), yes, it is affordable, but for a $1000+ an image, with the photo being a couple of days out of date, this becomes somewhat out of touch for most farmers. Normal fixed wing planes also cost too much for everyday use, unless of course you base the government department in a town that is very marginal, and since most of the town relies on the department staying alive, which leads to both political parties spending up big time, then this isn't viable either. Of course, the images produce by these planes are a heck of a lot better quality, remember, only a couple of years ago did we get
      Things like the Adelaide University (Australia) project involving photos taken by remote controlled plane with cameras attached, make alot more sense.

      Of course, another reason for the delay is because of the military checking of the photos to make sure they aren't of politically sensitive areas :P

  • sorry but (Score:2, Informative)

    by westcourt_monk ( 516239 )
    Nothing new here, move along.

    The lumber companies in Canada have been using GIS to better map their harvesting. They also have reduced the impact by being able to better utilize the mesh of old bush roads. Plus they get a better idea of the size and age of trees by looking at IR images.

    GIS has also been used on farming with large farms - a farmer couldn't possibly monitor 1000's of hectres.

    Check the Faculty of Environmental Studies [uwaterloo.ca] page at the University of Waterloo. [uwaterloo.ca] They have all kinds of cool uses for GIS - sea ice studies are pretty interesting.

    • Agriculture Canada has been doing research in this since the early 80's. I worked with people writing QNX software for it in 1986. Originally it used transmitters at corners of sectors to triangulate the tractor. After the GPS service came more widely available, these were replace with GPS sensors, originally differential(one land with satellite), then finally satellite only after the U.S. government stopped mucking about with the GPS signal so much. see Research from Neil B. McLaughlin, Ph.D. [agr.gc.ca]
  • The future is here. We never saw it coming because we are riding it. Imagine targeted pesticide control and fertilization. Cost savings and environmental impacts would be outstanding! Now if we can just convince farmers to fork out the $$$

  • The man (Score:4, Funny)

    by DCram ( 459805 ) on Thursday February 28, 2002 @09:07PM (#3088047)
    Just another example of the man keeping the farmer down. First its GPS. Then its fences around the field. Next comes the little collars that were in that prison movie with Rutger Hauer that we can trigger to blow from space.

    While we are on that space theme i would like to say i would like to see a big laser make popcorn out of a whole field of corn almost like that real genious movie. Now that would be cool.

    WAIT!!

    Could that be why we are GPS'n the fields?

    Mmmmmmmm...popcorn.

  • Bravo! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Cally ( 10873 ) on Thursday February 28, 2002 @09:09PM (#3088058) Homepage
    What an excellent idea! Let's save the environment by using geostationary and low earth orbiting satellites, remote sensing, advanced remote sensing, GPS navigation, image analysts... or what about zillions of nanobots, hovering over the fields, acting as a distributed AI 'hive mind'...

    Alternatively we could get a clue and start paying the farmers what the market will bear, instead of subsidising them to produce grossly-resource intensive crap that destroys our health, screws the environment, costs us billions in tax (for subsidies), whilst millions starve, and only agrichemical multinationals and food processors benefit.

    some [caff.org] , further reading [google.com]...

    • isn't the point to use this technology to cut down the blanketing of chemicals and make for a more judicial and economic use of chems? That's what we've been telling people since this started (this story is hardly new). Only problem I have with the whole scheme is the privatization of the data - it comes from the Landsat satellites - and a private corp gets to charge for them - big bucks too.
    • It is scary what get marked as "insightful" here.

      Producing more and more food in an environmentally healthy way is basic requirement due to the population growth.

      This is completely ortogonal to the question of solving the social and political problems that provent a fair distribution of the produced food and keep the population growth going.

      Even if we do solve these problems in the best case we should expect the population to top in one or two generations at 15 to 20 billion people, due to the age distribition of the world population, and cultural resistance to change.

      We need to fight at both fronts to get through this situation without mass starvation worse than everything seen on this planet before combined.

      We need the technical means to increase production that much without destroying the environment in the process, and we need the social, economical and political changes that ensure this technoclogy is employed as well as ensure the population growth does eventually top in acceptable ways.

      Believing we can get through with either technical or social changes alone is dangerously naive.
    • The difficulty with paying the farmers "what the market will bear" is that this number is unpredictable and is subject to startling swings, thus making family farms a losing proposition. And anyway, what "market" are you talking about? Most farmers sell to a market dominated by a handful of gigantic corporations. If you somehow wormed around this fact, you would end up pricing some consumers out of the food market -- probably a bad idea.

      The problem is not that there are subsidies, the problem is that the only socially desirable objective incorporated into the subsidies is a steady, reliable, affordable stream of calories. It should be possible to construct a system of subsidies directed towards sustainable agriculture and good nutrition.

  • Sex-o-rama! (Score:1, Redundant)

    by webword ( 82711 )
    Hopefully this means there will be more hay to roll in!
  • At the end of the article, he said he was missing his dog, given that this is a NASA article, I'm assuming that they had room on a leftover Soyuz?

  • Not new (Score:3, Informative)

    by jweb ( 520801 ) <jweb68 AT hotmail DOT com> on Thursday February 28, 2002 @09:16PM (#3088094)
    Growing up in rural Iowa (no stoplights within a 20 mile radius even today), I can tell you that this is not a new concept. Heck, I remember the local paper (no web site, they're that much behind the times) running a multi-part story about farmers using GPS in 1996 or 1997.
  • This isn't really news. I suppose since it is being done with GPS it is "news for nerds" but Valmont industries (maker of Valley Sprinkler systems) has been putting sensors on their sprinkler systems for years. Then the sprinkler will talk to the farmers computer and let him know if there are problems with the soil or whatever else. The sprinkler also distributes fertilizer and the like automatically down to about 3 sq. feet.

  • Other neat GPS applications not mentioned (Score:4, Informative)

    by jageryager ( 189071 ) on Thursday February 28, 2002 @09:28PM (#3088126)
    As many have pointed out, precision farming is not a new thing. Check this link for a bunch of companies involved:

    http://www.prairielinks.com/aglinks/Farm_Equipme nt /Precision_Farming/

    The GPS allows them to do some neat stuff not mentioned in the article.

    Some systems can keep maps of the paths that equipment took traveling over a feild. This information can be used to guide the operator down the exact same path within an inch, or 2, on the next application. This can minimize crop damage from getting run over, and also reduces soil compaction.

    Some systems can be programmed to know how wide of a swath the equipment covers, and can then guide the operator to get very accurate coverage without skips or overlap. This functionality is particularly valuable when making applications that can not be easily seen by the operator, such as sprays.

    Better systems can even have a limited auto pilot feature that is integrated into the tractor. Once you are on track you tell the system to take over and it steers.

    Cool stuff!

    Kevin
  • A trend of paying off farmers to limit their productions, while trying to improve their crop yeild with technoligy?

    contradiction in goals and practice?

    Perhaps not.
    If a farmer can use his rescources to the greatest possible result, he might be able to become self reliant again. Today most farmers are supplimented [aamu.edu] by govt. assistance programs. If the GPS system and other technological advancements help without raising the cost unreasonably. And the land that was needed was reduced in size and produced the same or more produce, this could free the farmers from needing assistance.
    • Unfortunately this is unlikely to happen. The biggest problem with turning a profit in farming these days is the price of the commodity in the first place. My father-in-law owns a fairly sizeable (2000 acre) spread in Iowa, and only just breaks even WITH subsidy help. The prices of corn and soybeans (his staple crops) are so low that it's barely worth growing it.

      Ironically, having the smaller farmers going out of business doesn't often affect the price. The problem isn't over-saturation of the market with product, but the farming mega-corporations buying out the smaller farms and driving the independants who are left out of business by undercutting their prices. The livestock marketplace is already a business area where the smaller independant farmer can't now turn a profit. Pretty much everybody left working in it is now just a 'farm manager' for one of the big conglomerates.

      Sadly I think the days of the independant farmer are numbered.
  • My uncle has a combine that has GPS, he has had it for 5 or 6 years now. His boat has GPS, his car has GPS, hell, I think he even tracks his damn dog with it. That combine has a cd player and cost about ohhhhh a quarter million dollars, I think he even put a playboy rack in there
  • I worked for Trimble a couple of years ago, and they had essentially autonomous tractors using a system called AutoSteer. Using kinematic differential GPS, accuracy is down to 1cm.

    Construction equipment has 2 or 3 of these systems so slope can be maintained.

  • A better technological breakthrough can be found in Agroecology. The problem with global agriculture is not with production. Global organizations such as the IMF and the WTO impose policies that force marginalized farming communities to grow food for export while they face lower incomes and a lack of self sustainablility. It has been shown that several smaller acre farms will outproduce a single larger industrial farm (in terms of production per acre).

    Here is an excerpt from Peter Rosset, Joseph Collins, and Frances Moore Lappé's Lessons from the Green Revolution:

    More Food and Yet More Hunger?

    Despite three decades of rapidly expanding global food supplies, there are still an estimated 786 million hungry people in the world in the 1990s. Where are these 786 million hungry people? Since the early 1980s, media representations of famines in Africa have awakened Westerners to hunger there, but Africa represents less than one-quarter of the hunger in the world today. We are made blind to the day-in-day-out hunger suffered by hundreds of millions more. For example, by the mid-1980s, newspaper headlines were applauding the Asian success stories-India and Indonesia, we were told, had become "self-sufficient in food" or even "food exporters." But it is in Asia, precisely where Green Revolution seeds have contributed to the greatest production success, that roughly two-thirds of the undernourished in the entire world live.

    According to Business Week magazine, "even though Indian granaries are overflowing now," thanks to the success of the Green Revolution in raising wheat and rice yields, "5,000 children die each day of malnutrition. One-third of India's 900 million people are poverty-stricken." Since the poor can't afford to buy what is produced, "the government is left trying to store millions of tons of foods. Some is rotting, and there is concern that rotten grain will find its way to public markets." The article concludes that the Green Revolution may have reduced India's grain imports substantially, but did not have a similar impact on hunger.

    Such analysis raises serious questions about the number of hungry people in the world in 1970 versus 1990, spanning the two decades of major Green Revolution advances. At first glance, it looks as though great progress was made, with food production up and hunger down. The total food available per person in the world rose by 11 percent over those two decades, while the estimated number of hungry people fell from 942 million to 786 million, a 16 percent drop. This was apparent progress, for which those behind the Green Revolution were understandably happy to take the credit.

    But these figures merit a closer look. If you eliminate China from the analysis, the number of hungry people in the rest of the world actually increased by more than 11 percent, from 536 to 597 million. In South America, for example, while per capita food supplies rose almost 8 percent, the number of hungry people also went up, by 19 percent. In south Asia, there was 9 percent more food per person by 1990, but there were also 9 percent more hungry people. Nor was it increased population that made for more hungry people. The total food available per person actually increased. What made possible greater hunger was the failure to address unequal access to food and food-producing resources.

    The remarkable difference in China, where the number of hungry dropped from 406 million to 189 million, almost begs the question: which has been more effective at reducing hunger-the Green Revolution or the Chinese Revolution, where broad-based changes in access to land paved the way for rising living standards?

    Whether the Green Revolution or any other strategy to boost food production will alleviate hunger depends on the economic, political, and cultural rules that people make. These rules determine who benefits as a supplier of the increased production-whose land and crops prosper and for whose profit-and who benefits as a consumer of the increased production-who gets the food and at what price.

    • It has been shown that several smaller acre farms will outproduce a single larger industrial farm (in terms of production per acre).

      Hmmm. Can you cite? This would be an interesting figure....

      And it sortof contradicts what you say below... if it's not the quantity that matters any more, why does it matter that several smaller farms can outproduce.

      Is there a better distribution effect from several smaller farms?

      And how DO you solve the problem of distribution?

      • Yes I have this study to cite:
        This Paper [foodfirst.org]
        Written by the great Agroecologist Peter Rosset...

        I guess I failed to point out the social benefits of smaller farms... In a system of larger agricultural farms, farm owners tend to be very rich and farm workers are very poor: the rural economy is transformed from one of self-suficiency to one in which farmers are forced to make livings as wage earners. The point is, more small farms means more farmers producing for themselves rather than becoming dependent on the poor wages derived from farm work.

        Also, smaller farms (with diverse crops) can be more easily tended to without expensive (economically and socially!) pesticides or chemical fertilizers. This helps eliminate the health dangers associated with agrochemicals (sometimes known as the "hidden economy" of industrial agriculture)...

        I'm not sure what this problem of distribution is? In countries like Afghanistan, where only 11% of the land is arable, there is an understandable distribution problem. But what is more prevalent is a "policy" problem, where there is food available everywhere, and people don't have the money to buy food.

        India currently has almost half of the world's hungry (defined as people who do not consume enough calories to sustain daily activity) at 250-300 million. However, India currently has about 60 to 70 tonnes of grain in storage, grown for export in accordance with IMF/World Bank Policy! This is insane. I suppose that I would say, to solve the distribution problem that India faces, would be to:

        • Focus on growing agriculture for local market
        • Eliminate ridiculous global institutions like the IMF, and the WTO... programs that favor the interests of industrial agriculture.
        • Focus on bringing more economic equity to the world...
        • >In a system of larger agricultural farms, farm owners tend to be very rich and farm workers are very poor: the rural economy is transformed from one of self-suficiency to one in which farmers are forced to make livings as wage earners. The point is, more small farms means more farmers producing for themselves rather than becoming dependent on the poor wages derived from farm work.

          The problem with small farms here in America, is that the economics of food, combined with the overhead of our society, has made it very hard to keep a farm that is small enough to be run by a typical family.

          Farms must get bigger in order to make enough to stay in business. We all bitch and moan if the price of milk goes up by a nickel a gallon. After the grocery, and the middle men, and the processors all take their cut, that leaves about 1 penny for the dairymen. In USA the price of milk to farmers right now is about what it was in 1981. You can bet everything else has gone up.

          Even the small diversified subsistance farmer, who plans to grow a variety of crops and products that he can eat and use himself, still needs to make enough money to pay local taxes, school taxes, state taxes, federal taxes, sales taxes, a mortgage, and put his kids through 4 years a Cornell.

          Kevin
  • On my uncle's farm for the past 6 years +, he has been using GPS tools while in tractor and then back home to get better information on what exactly is going on. For example, if an irigation system dies, then it keeps the same possistion and he gets a page immediatly. If a tractor stays in the same possistion he knows something is wrong, immediate page. The GPS devices are also used to track rodent populations. We can go out, find out where the holes are and record their possistion. Then we combine that data year after year and know exactly how say the mole or ant population is in the fields. Another thing we used them for on the farm was ATV Paintballing ...
    • Last year my aunt and my mother worked on a few of the fields that were out of rotation and just had some barley (i think) growing up that was to just let die. Well, once it got to be relatively tall, she used the GPS handheld to map out a big smiley face in the field and took the atv with miniplow out and made herself a big smiley face.

      She then used one of the satalite imaging places to take a good picture of it and made some caption like "The Happiest place on Earth, Kansas", had them printed and sells them as suveniers all over here in KS. That has net'd her quite a bit of cash
  • This is unbelievably interesting because I just got home from my Agriculture policy lecture where we were discussing this very thing. Precision farming.
    The thing to keep in mind here is that this kind of technology only benefits farmers that are already efficiently using the things that aid agriculture (like fertilizer and pesticides). For instance... if you take a developing nation, precision farming doesnt help at all... the technology will spit out data that says "you need to use more of input A, input B, and input C, *everywhere*."
    However, in North America, the benefits of this technology have unbelievable possibilities. The economic advantages of using your inputs in the most efficient way possible will produce the greatest yields farmers have ever seen.
    Farmers typically are having trouble making profits (or so they say). profits are revenues minus costs, and the costs of agriculture are big. For large farms, these inputs are on such large economies of scale that the smallest advantages in using the inputs better will create very large increases in profits.
  • Precision farming has been around a long time - 5 years at least. Before that there were a lot of farmers that were doing geographic sensing - using satellite imagery to see if there were moist soil areas, or other areas that yeilded better results, etc. The whole thing should work a lot better now with the (near)elimiation of Selective Availability (SA) so no more need for Differential GPS, which can get expensive to do real-time.

    There are a ton of real good applications for GPS and GPS & GIS besides findout how far from the pin you are at 14.
  • i was working for a company in 1992-3 called
    Alamo Group in Seguin tx that was doing this.

    not exactly bleeding edge stuff here.
  • All this can be done without GPS, the satalittes and aircraft generally know where they are and since they are taking pictures and the farmers should be able to recognize their own fields, why exactly do they need GPS???? This might make things a little easier, but the easiest is to just furtalize evenly anyway, this whole we'll find bugs and only use insectisides in those places seems highly suspect, won't the bugs realize that there are other areas with less pesticides and go there, kinda like 3 card monty. GPS doesn't really help or suddenly make this feasable, NASA should be concerned with gett rockets up not inventing new ways to make themselves necessary. NASA should lauch satallites, Dept Ag should distibute photos, farmers should plan crops and control fields, we don't need to spend billions to grow corn that farmers are getting paid not to grow anyway. More technology to the people and stop major government projcets that don't work!!!!
    • Trust me, GPS in agriculture is a *good* thing. It's hard to fertilize evenly if you don't know exactly where to drive the tractor relative to your previous path. On my family's farm I'm generally tasked with operating the fertilizer spreader. It's designed to be run in swaths that are 50 feet apart. Before we put a GPS guidance system in the tractor, I had to try to follow the tracks from a 100-foot-wide drag (a tillage tool that has spring-tooth harrows which scrape the ground. It had sprayer nozzles on it too, for pre-plant herbicide application.) I could follow the wheel tracks the first time then drive along where the end of the implement had passed. We replaced that machine with a 90 foot Case IH sprayer, however, and so I now had nothing to follow. With the GPS unit I know exactly where I need to be. This way less fertilizer is wasted by over- or under-applying. And now all I have to do is follow the blinking lights instead of worrying "am I 50 feet from my last track" all the time.
  • we used gps systems to map the spread of an invasive weed in the yampa district in colorado. yellow toad flax, poisonous to the wild horses in the region, was pushing out the native plant life. accurate mapping of the weed allowed pinpoint spraying by teams (horseback and tractor) vice massive aerial application.
  • All of this is good news for American farmers, who have, for years, struggled to compete with the cheap labor in other countries. The only reason that most US farmers are still in business is because of inefficient government subsides; if the "american farmer" can be saved through effective technology and increased efficiency instead, all to it!
    • Technology like this only makes farming more expensive, and more exclusive. Ditch the romantic view that this is like the coming of the steam engine, or development of the plow. It's yet another cost and obfuscation that makes farming more accessible for corporations and less accessible for the farmer with only a few sections.

      Also, those 'inefficient' subsidies are responsible for the extremely low food prices in the US. You like milk at $2.30 a gallon, and $.75 for a loaf of bread? That's pretty cheap shit. Hamburger for $1/lb. Americans get the subsidies back every single day they purchase food. Another reason: we don't want to be dependent on imported food. Look at the disgusting situation with oil, and that problems that causes when even a 2% change in production comes through. Fucking turmoil. Imagine if that was wheat, or soy, or seed corn. We'd be fucked six ways from Sunday.
  • They have been doing this since before the web.
  • Following the incredible discovery of fire, man's knowledge leaped forward with the invention of the wheel.
  • BASF was doing this in 1995

    • Agreed. And on top of that, the findings were that it didn't help. They found that the areas that did not yield well did not improve with application of more fertalizer. And there is only so much fertalizer you can put on a given spot. It basically came down that it was best to just use the same amount all over, as there was not even enough gain to evercome the added time and effort (read: money).

      • "And there is only so much fertalizer you can put on a given spot. "

        Umm, that's sort of the point. If the soil won't benefit from the fertilizer, there is no point in applying it because it will just run off into the water system.

        Using this technology they can also vary the rate at which seeds are put in the ground. Since some soil will support more plants than others, this saves the cost of seed in the bad areas.

        The debate when I was working with this back in 1994 was the cost/benefit analysis. At that time the equipment was incredibly expensive. A good GPS receiver was at least $5k, and a computer powerful enough to process the maps another $5-10k. Not to mention the equipment from Agchem and others to do variable rate application.

        The costs of much of the technology has come down dramatically since then. That $10k computer back then is less powerful than what you can buy for $500 today, same with the GPS receivers and so on.
        • True. I personally know a large family farm that did this a while back (4 years or so???). They have decent land.

          After going through all the analysis and work, they had a net loss over all, because at the end of it all, there was so little land where the research dictate a change that it was MUCH more cost effective to just ignore it all together.

          This would probably be different if more of the land would dictate a change in behaivor.

          I might also add that they farm A LOT of land, and that they are very good in terms of conservation, crop rotation, and so. They farm for profit, and they do that by properly sustaining their land.

          And they're good people, too.
        • It still isn't cost effective. For the expenditure of capital in equipment and then add on top of it technical support when the dang thing breaks down, you are still looking at too much of a cost per acre than current methods that can be used. The best method is to find an INDEPENDENT crop consultant, one that doesn't work for an elevator, doesn't sell any chemical products, and doesn't have any ties to agribusiness companies other than years of experience in the fields working with farmers to see what they have and how to improve it. All the stuff produced by GPS yield systems in combines are useless because by the time you get to the end of harvest everything that you could have done to enhance the yields was in the past.

          If you are lucky enough to find one of these that knows their stuff (i used to work with 3 of them) then you can do reduced chemical applications much better than any automated GPS anything. Why? Because a weed doesn't grow across the entire field. One corn field might have the insect you want to kill and one right next to it might not. Why spray your entire 640 acres of corn with a pesticide that costs $40+ an acre when it's the bloody 20 acre patch in near the trees thats getting hit.

          What people don't realize is that it takes a LOT of REPEATED walking of the fields to find out what is out there and then react to that. A technological solution will not work here. Repeated visits on ATVs or by walking is the only way to go. If you want to reduce herbicide costs,and you use this approach, you can use 1/2 to 1/4th of the recommended dosage of a herbicide to kill of the weeds you want to kill. Agribusiness companies are going to tell you that because they want to:
          1. Sell as much as possible
          2. Sell it as quickly as possible
          3. Spend the least amount of time doing it

          This is no different than any other business. Mix up a batch of chemical that should kill everything out in the field in one pass and then use that same mix over multiple farms: REGARDLESS of what is in there at the time. So what if only 1 of the 3 or 4 chemicals were actually needed. So what if the all the fields didn't need it.

          Can this technology help. Yes, IF it can identify weeds as they grow, tell you when they are at the most vulnerable to kill them (that's when they are small and they look very similar to each other. it takes experience to be able to distinguigh them from one another), be able to sample with cost effectiveness sample sizes that approach 0.1 acres (not achievable), and..... I can go on. You can use the GPS to define general areas of impact and then use that with general areas of application. But the way it's marketed and talked about its snake oil that cures all ills.

          You get my drift I hope. A lot of farmers are ripped off each year and they don't even know it because they don't have a way of verifying the chemical application advice of chemical/elevator company "agronomists". BTW, farmers aren't the only ones that get hit by this. Ever hear of chemical lawn companies? :) And don't get me wrong, there are some ethical people out there who will tell the client where the bear squats in the woods. They are few and far between and often get laid off by managers for not meeting sales expectations.
          • I used to work in this industry. We sold software and services that did the GIS/mapping work from the data collected from Agleader yield monitors, etc. Actually our company was about 1/2 mile down the road from Agleader.

            We only worked with Independent Ag consultants, and what you say is correct. There was a lot of manual labor involved collecting GPS positioned data... soil samples, insect and weed locations, etc. Then over the winter all of this data would be collected together and plotted into plans for the next season. It was a feedback loop of sorts.

            But I agree, that cost/benefit analysis is a big part of it. At the time I was in this, there was a suspicion that the EPA was going to get involved and start changing the rules on pesticide application, etc... which would mean you pretty much had to go to variable rate application in order to comply.
  • So, are there any NewEngland agri-tech employers looking for UNIX Admins? Any non-internet centric companies with a penchant for biological systems and UNIX.

  • old news (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I live in Saskatchewan, Canada. It is all farming up here. About 6 years ago, I taught an introductory HTML class. There was a combine salesman in attendance, he wanted to learn how to make a web page to help him sell combines. He had a brochure detailing gps equipped combines and sprayers that have sensors built in, etc. I asked him how many % of the combines he sells has this stuff built in. He said all combines are sold fully loaded now (that includes a cooler, air conditioning, air shock mounted seat, stereo system, gps guidance, computer monitoring systems on the output (they check for grain being wasted) etc. The harvest data from the gps system is even stored on a ram-card so that it can be fed into the seeder and sprayers! Literally all he sold were fully equipped. The farmer's rationalle: what is another 10 or 20 thousand when you are already spending $250,000 on one piece of equipment! alsdf
  • Farmers have been using GPS regularly for just this described purpose since about 1995. Why is it just now making headlines? -JT
  • GPS: Left...Right...Left...Congratulations, you have just Frenched your daughter.

    "I'm going steady, and I French kiss."
    "Yeah, well, everybody does that."
    "Well, Daddy says I'm the best at it."
  • I know some farmers in North Dakota who do a LOT of field/crop work and they said that this GPS is an awesome tool. You can even get combines or tractors that are controlled by GPS. You could run them from your kitchen table, if you wanted. Just punch in the coordiates or tell it to move south 50 feet or make a right turn, et cetera. Of course these are not in use, but the prototypes are there. As for using GPS in combines/tractors, they use them commonly and I know they are trying to get them installed in most of their vehicles. Obviously if you farm 13.5 acres, it might not be worth your time. But for the farmers in ND, NE, KS, et cetera, this is something that makes their job a lot easier.
  • My cousin-in-law is from an Iowa farming family but has a knack for technology. The result is, he started working with an Iowa company to develop and deploy these a few years ago. They've been deploying these in the field (quite literally)for the last three years; he gave me an excellent demonstration at Christmas last year. They can tell everything about crop yields and, most significantly, remember the information and send it to a unit in the fertilizer spreaders to make sure the parts of the field with the lowest yield receive the most fertilizer. His father's farm, which has been doing this for three years, has already seen a more even distribution (and hence large overall production) across their 400 acres.
  • Various systems like this have been in use since at least the early 90's, and have been getting steadily better since. We implemented the idea in 95, and found the inforamtion it has provided us invaluable. The tractor and combine mounted computers are really the only ones my dad ever wants to use. It's really been too long since technology like this has made it to the farm.

  • John Deere has been doing this for awhile. Crap, they showed them at the local farm show two or more years ago. I'm sure the maps are much better, but the technology hasn't changed much. It still takes a good farmer to use it, which is getting rare these days in mass production.

    Yee ha.
  • In 1994 I was working as an intern for a company that was creating firmware that would do this very thing. I was debugging some code from their version 3 so I assume this had been going on for a little while now.
  • A couple of years ago during some time staying on a farm in Australia I got to go up for a ride with the crop duster. He was using DGPS to fly as close to the edges of the field as possible without too much overspray.

    You may not think it is hard to know when you are over the edge of a field but this guy was flying low and fast with seriously sharp turns at each end. Down was not often down. I think we trimmed the tree tops with the wingtip into the bargian.

    OF course this was not varying the dose over area by GPS but with big fields the advantages in cost saving make these cool toys well worth it to the farmer, and there is some environmetal advantage for free (As much as can be when tending a monoculture)
  • Farmer: Dang, I'm Lost

    Farmer's Son: It's ok pa, We've got the GPS, it'll tell us where we are

    Farmer: Good thinkin', junior

    Farmer's Son: OK, y'all wait on, nearly got a signal.. OK, I got it!

    Farmer: So, where are we?

    Farmer's Son: We are at 123.45'56"E, 43.45'23"N

    Farmer: So.....

    Farmer's Son: Pa! Pa! I know where we are now!

    Farmer: Where, son, where? Tell your old man

    Farmer's Son: Well, Sir, Well, Pa, Well, we're in a corn field.

    Well, nobody else made any farmer jokes!

  • There is quite a lot of interest in PF in the radar remote sensing community. However, one of the most interesting things that RS (EO for American /. readers :D) is the fact that it can produce (I hope) accurate predictions of crop yield. This is very important, as agricultural logistics can be simplified a lot by knowing even small time/yeild differentials.

    The fact that radar is all-weather, night and day also means that it can be used in countries such as the UK, where the presence of clouds would be a major hassle :-)
    Some links:

  • when this same technology is applied to

    a) crop dusting

    b) organic farming

    (And no, the two are not mutually exclusive!!)
  • As many people have already pointed out, GPS has been used for years, but what it's been used for is not large-scale precision application of fertilizers or pesticides, but for yield mapping. With a GPS on the tractor, and a dynamic load-sensor on the harvester, you can determine how many pounds of product you're getting off of any given square yard. The application of fertilizers is still much broader scale than that, and the reason has to do with the soil.

    During a post-doc at Michigan State, I helped develop a grant proposal to develop a precision-ag system back in 1998. The biggest sticking point in the whole project was the fact that the efficacy of fertilizers is strongly influenced by the soil characteristics: drainage, % organic matter, ratios of sand/silt/clay, etc. Maybe in Kansas the soil is completely uniform on a meter-scale, but in most areas, it varies significantly. A given section of a corn field may be underproducing, not becasue it coudl use more fertilizer, but because it's sitting on top of a two-meter clay lens that won't allow it to use the fertilizer you've been giving it.

    To make meter-scale chemical application worth the extra effort (and information management is a big effort/cost), you have to have soil profiling done on a meter-scale, and that is a hell of a lot of soil samples that have to be processed. Unlike yield mapping, you can't just turn on the laptop in the cab of the tractor and start rolling.... in a precision soil-mapping project, that's thousands of little bags of soil to be sent back to the lab for chemical and physical analysis, in addition to any nematode or insect tests.

    To top it off, the soil profile of a given field changes with time, so the hugely expensive detailed soil map that you made three years ago? Gotta go do it again.

    I wish them luck.
  • seeing a barcode scanner at the grocery store.
    Come on guys this is old, old news.

    Next thing you'll be talking about how ships
    are using GPS for navigating the sees!

    WOW!

  • This is my Job (Score:3, Informative)

    by Tsu-na-mi ( 88576 ) on Friday March 01, 2002 @12:03PM (#3090466) Homepage
    I write software for this industry for a living. We collect field boundaries, fertilizer and pesticide data (types and amounts used, application method), and other farming practices. When it comes time to harvest the crop, a device called a yield monitor (GPS plus flow and other sensors) collects data on how much crop is harvested at a given point in the field.

    It's an idea that had been gaining a lot of momentum in the farming industry for a while, but it is starting to become apparent it is not as useful as they thought. The growers like the pretty pictures the GPS maps give them, but their utility as tools is severely limited. Changing levels of chemical application in a field does not have as much of an impact as you would think. Not to mention the education level of the average ag worker is not all that high, so data collection is a difficult process.

    What IS useful however is statistical analysis of these farming practices. Seed companies like Pioneer have universities run tests on their varieties and report on the results. The problem is that these tests are all conducted on tiny "test plots" of a fraction of an acre. It's simply too small a sample to get reliable results. With the data we have collected, we can state with a fair degree of certainty what farming practices will result in higher yields. Conventional vs No-Till farming, what crop order to rotate, what row spacing to plant at, etc.

    --
    David Christpher Asher
    AgVenture, LLC.
  • It's been in use for some time. I think we tend to underestimate the amount of technology available to farmers today. Last summer my cousin in Iowa gave me a tour of some of his cooler toys... the cab of his combine is reminiscent of an x-wing cockpit.

  • sad (Score:1)

    by drizuid ( 444751 )
    I thought i could be cool and show off my knowledge of farming by telling you all this has been being done for... a long time.. but.. i'm late :( oh well
  • It does seem like a great idea, however these are the most important reasons I won't use them.

    1) This sounds VERY expensive, and in the end it doesn't accomplish any more then what a competent farmer can do.

    2) In a decade where we are beginning to learn that "Producing more" doesn't mean winning, most farmers are REDUCING their amount of acres to grow the most unusual crops a person has ever seen. Pumpkins, flowers (for seeds for urban gardeners), etc. What use would I have for one of these when I have a field consisting of 15 acres of a crop that keeps my farm going?

  • As many posts to this site have pointed out, using GPS in agriculture is not new. However, there is one application that would be of great economic and environmental value. An affordable centimeter range differential GPS signal that can be used for a farm sized area would allow farmers to drive tractors through their fields year after year and always drive in the same place. This ability seems like it would be trivial and only of intrest to the technocrat, but the reality of the situation is quite different. Every time a tractor drives through a field it compacts and damages the soil. By making the same tractor passes year after year, a farmer could seperate his farmland into plantland and narrow strips of tractorland.
    But, there is a more important application. If a farmer is able to always drive in the same spot, he can do more exotic things to the other parts of the field without risk of damaging them. One of the possibilities (which is already being tested by the Malheur Experiment Station [cropinfo.net]) is permanent buried drip irrigation systems. This modifies the existing drip irrigation systems by buring the tape about 11 inches below the soil and leaving it in for multiple seasons. This significantly decreases the cost of using drip irrigation. The drip irrigation is a small buried tape which emits water in the root zone of the plants. It allows the minimum ammount of water to be applied to irrigate a crop. This has many invironmental benefits. Because no excess water is applied to the field, there is no runoff, which can contain agricultural chemicals. There is also no excess water, so a process called leaching does not take place. In this process excess water seeps down through the soil, carrying with it ag chemicals, and fertilizer, both naturaly occuring and artificial. When the nitrogen is not leached out of the soil, less fertilizer must be applied to the field to produce similar yields.
    High precission farm GPS will help to minimize damage to fields from tractor traffic, enable the use of permantent drip irrigation systems, and possibly technologies which have not yet been concieved. These technologies are of significant interest because they will allow more economic and environmentaly friendly farming practices in the future.

  • Alex Toeffler wrote a book a decade ago on the different waves of technology- agriculture, industry, and tech/knowledge. The eariler waves don't disappear, but are enhanced by the later waves. Agriculture is enhanced by both industry and high tech.

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