Web design by Lewis McKerrow 2011

GPS has had a major impact on the way we all live our lives today, and more increasingly it is having an impact on the way we farm.

As machines have become wider and tractors bigger it has become much harder for the operator to judge how far he should be driving from his last application mark, historically this is why we have tramlines in crops, to enable us not to miss bits or overlap. But even tramlines can be about 2 metres out due to innacuracies when planting the crop. This is where GPS comes in, GPS enables a computer to use the satellites to give an accurate ‘virtual row’ to drive down, this is normally displayed as a line on a computer screen in the tractor cab, with arrows telling the operator to steer left or right to keep on line.

GPS also helps with record keeping, if we fill in a job on the tractor computer it will have an accurate date and time we were in that field completing that job.