CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — When Martin Barbre got his first look three years ago at a system that would drive his tractor for him, he didn’t buy the device — or the premise it would cut costs.
“It seemed like a fancy gadget,” said Barbre, a 53-year-old who grows corn and soybeans in southern Illinois.
But with the cost of fuel, seeds, fertilizer and just about everything else it takes to grow crops rising fast, he quickly came around after he began using the Global Positioning System device to drive his tractor a year and a half ago. “As soon as we used it, we realized the benefits,” Barbre said.
With auto-steering, a farmer manually drives the perimeter of a field to map its boundaries so the GPS gadget can direct the tractor to carve near-perfectly straight rows. A few systems even turn the tractor around at the end of each row. By cutting down on overlap, the system saves fuel, and it means the same ground won’t be planted twice or sprayed unnecessarily with fertilizer or pesticides.
American grain farmers are enjoying the highest crop prices of their lives, but they don’t expect that to last forever. As a hedge against the inevitable downturn, owners of mid-size farms such as Barbre — and even some smaller-scale farmers — are investing that cash in technology that’s increasingly integrated.
Large-scale farmers have used GPS-based automated steering for tractors, sensors that probe soil for nutrients and moisture, and other gadgets since the late 1990s to cut their expenses and increase their production. It wasn’t until the past five years or so, however, that owners of smaller and mid-size farms could realize enough savings from using high-end technology to significantly offset their rising costs, said Dan Davidson, an agronomist with agricultural-data company DTN in Omaha.
Sure, there were environmental benefits: spraying less fertilizer and fewer herbicides; not overwatering; and cutting fuel costs. And farmers could take the high-tech data gathered in the field, download it to their computers and use it in planning.
But now fertilizer used by corn and soybean farms costs almost double what it did two years ago, while seeds and fuel cost almost 50 percent more, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Meanwhile, the cost of auto-steering systems has remained relatively flat or fallen. Systems that now typically cost from a few thousand dollars to $25,000 used to run as high as $40,000.
High-tech farming tools
More than half of U.S. farmers use at least one high-tech tool. Here are some of the most popular:
Guidance systems: Using the Global Positioning System, or GPS, this technology automatically drives tractors and combines.
Benefits include straighter crop lines with less overlap, which helps reduce consumption of fuel, seeds, fertilizer and pesticide.
Yield monitors: These systems help farmers track productivity in each section of a field by measuring harvest.
Variable-rate applicators: These allow farmers to plant seeds or apply fertilizer and herbicides based on data about the soil content of a given section of a field or the health of the plants in that area.
Sources: Ohio State University, Purdue University
