What's this chap doing?

[+Sussex Leprechauns]

He whizzed around a field at the back of our house this afternoon, seemed to stop occasionally and stick/plant something in the ground, any ideas what he might have been doing?

 

[+BlueDeuce]

Is that field used for crops? GPS surveying is common in farming.

[+The Forester]

He's soil sampling.

 

Modern crop sprayers and fertiliser spreaders have a digital map of the field and every single square metre ("bin") of the field has its own dosage prescription of whatever nutrients of agrichems it needs. The prescription package is updated by satellite at least once a year, usually much more often than that, but the remote sensing data has to be calibrated with the "ground truth".

 

What you've seen is a sampler taking samples from position-logged positions to calibrate the system.

 

If you watch a modern crop-sprayer, you'll see the individual nozzles constantly flickering as they adjust to whichever square metre that nozzle is covering at that instant. Quite often you'll see several, or even all, nozzles switching off entirely.

 

It makes a massive saving for the farmer as it avoids overdosing and underdosing. It's also very good for the rivers and other watercourses as it almost eliminates excessive applications of stuff such as nitrogeneous fertiilsers which otherwise runs off the fields and causes serious pollution problems downstream and even in estuaries.

Edited September 9, 2009 by The Forester

[+Sussex Leprechauns]

What a great answer, I hadn't realised farming had got THAT sophisticated. Many thanks for the detailed response Forester,

 

Nick

[+Amberel]

What a great answer, I hadn't realised farming had got THAT sophisticated. Many thanks for the detailed response Forester

Only just spotted this as I've been away caching for a couple of days. It's been "THAT sophisticated" for a long time now . This is something I've been working on for a long time (I'm a computer programmer), and it's quite possible that the quad bike in the picture belongs to my customer.

 

I'm in the process of doing some updates to the program, so checked to find that we started doing this at the beginning of 1996. In the early days we built the GPS kit ourselves, and I had a lot of fun tearing round the fields on the quad bikes testing things out, but it's a decade since I've actually had to go and see anything in operation.

 

Rgds, Andy

[+Watford Wobble]

And there was me thinking farmers just flung cow sh1t everywehere once in a while.

[+BlueDeuce]

 

oh, they still do.

[+SidAndBob]

And there was me thinking farmers just flung cow sh1t everywhere once in a while.

LOL Same here.

[+The Forester]

And there was me thinking farmers just flung cow sh1t everywehere once in a while.

 

No, that's politicians who do that.

 

Now that I've seem my own MP's expense account, I think farmers dispense a lot less bullsh1t, and much more cheaply, than politicians do.

[The Hearse]

 

I believe this is in the wrong thread. The machine is actually hiding micros in Wiltshire!