Once used for war, GPS systems are now playing a new role in agriculture – and a new generation of comparable technologies is coming to the fore, WAFarmers CEO Trevor Whittington says
Precision agriculture in part was a product of the Cold War.
Following the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, the need to map and track a rocket became an imperative, in order to destroy it.
As the Russian and American intercontinental missiles got more sophisticated, both sides built harder and deeper bunkers to protect their rockets – which in turn required ever more accurate targeting. In the end the targets needed to be almost metre-accurate as the madness of Mutually Assured Destruction reached its height in the 1970s and 80s.
This race for precision directly led to the creation of the Global Positioning System (GPS) which commenced in 1973, with the first prototype spacecraft launched in 1978 and the full constellation of 24 satellites becoming operational in 1993.
 |
|
Satellite technology’s role has changed markedly
|
Civilian access to the GPS technology was allowed from 1984 following an executive order by President Reagan after Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by the Russians after flying off course.
The very first satellites only offered irregular fixes and were accurate to within a kilometre, but from Day One the pressure was on for the private sector to have access to this revolutionary technology that saw an end to the centuries long use of navigation by the stars and location fixing from set ground stations.
It was not until the collapse of the USSR and its Soviet sphere of influence in 1991, that the United States Department of Defence released the algorithms of their highly protected GPS system to allow mapping to within metres, and then centimetres.
Up until then the United States government had placed pass codes on the system to selectively deny access to enemy countries in times of war, which encouraged several countries to embark on setting up their own global or regional satellite navigation systems.
The Russian Global Navigation Satellite System was developed contemporaneously with the American GPS system but suffered from incomplete coverage of the globe until the mid-2000s.
China’s Beidou System began global services in 2018, and finished its full deployment in 2020, the European Union’s Galileo System, India’s NacIC, and Japan’s Quasi-Zenithhave are now also all on stream.
The combination of cheap access to GPS positioning, smart phones, smart cameras and mobile coverage has driven an explosion of precision agriculture. Initially this was led by the big agri-machinery corporates such as John Deere and the likes of Trimble, Topcon and others.
But as the market has expanded new competitors have entered, lured by the huge potential of the precision farming sector, which is expected to hit US$23 billion by 2030.
The potential of tapping into the millions of mechanised farmers in developing and newly industrialised nations and supporting their next big leap forward in grain production is seen as the precision revolution, following on from the green revolution of new varieties in the 1960s, the chemical revolution of the 1970s and 80s and the move to mechanisation in the 1990s.
Technologically savvy large grain producing countries including Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine and Russia are as proficient at using this technology as we are, and the expansion into big grain growers China and India over the next decade could well force global grain prices back down to their long-term averages as these countries do the big yield jump that we have experienced over the last two decades.
In turn, companies like Tata from India, Beidou of China and Pro Solus of Brazil are already working to make highly affordable ag tech spray mapping systems, replacing products that cost $50,000 twenty years ago and $20,000 today with new systems that could ultimately cost about $2,000 at most.
So, before you rush out and buy the latest name brand US or European designed GPS Guidance, steering and spray control system, go have a look at what’s on offer on the web, you will be surprised how cheap it is.