Northern Lights Cause Precision Ag Blackout

A solar storm hobbled precision Ag equipment, showing the pitfalls of "high-tech" farming machinery.

In covering the struggle for a right to repair agricultural equipment, one common story or theme has been the decision by many farmers to ditch pricey but fickle late model “precision” agricultural equipment for “dumb(er” models from the 1980s or 90s, before tractors, harvesters and other gear bristled with sensors, cellular modems and GPS navigation. (Matthew Gault’s story in Vice from 2020 describes this phenomenon well.)

One of the recurring themes in those stories is that farmers want equipment they can rely on, and fix themselves when things break (as they often do), while manufacturers are determined to lure farmers with impressive precision ag features, but then lock down their equipment in ways that frustrate simple repair and maintenance, while maximizing recurring revenue.

Precision agriculture equipment was hobbled by a solar storm that disrupted GPS communications throughout Canada and the northern U.S.

In other words: the cost of precision ag’s brilliant, tech-fueled features is brittleness. And that brittleness was on display again last week, when a series of “Coronal Mass Ejections” from the sun sent waves of charged particles into earth’s atmosphere. The solar storm produced brilliant displays of the “northern lights,” but also disrupted GPS satellite- and ground-based RTK wireless communications in Canada and many farming states in the northern U.S. The result: precision ag equipment that relies on those signals to navigate fields was hobbled.

In a text message and blog post to its customers on May 10th, Landmark Implements, a John Deere dealership serving Nebraska and Kansas warned that “significant solar flare and space weather activity (is) currently affecting GPS and RTK networks.”

Farmers were advised to “shut off RTK” and Deere’s Starfire GPS receivers to “eliminate the conflicting corrections that the machine is receiving from the base station due to the geomagnetic storm.”

Kevin Kenney, a Nebraska resident, farmer and advocate for repairable farm equipment, said that last week’s solar storm was the largest to hit the earth since GPS guidance farming started around 2006 and hit at a difficult time.

“We are about 50% done planting corn right now and we lose a percentage of yield everyday after May 15th,” he wrote in a text to Fight to Repair Newsletter. “This shutdown in the middle of the business part of the year is definitely a problem.”

“This is a significant event because it's going to undermine all the confidence that these tractor telematics (conveniences)have led people to embrace,” Kenney wrote.

The effects of the outage will likely be felt far into the planting season as farmers look to leverage GPS-enabled features on their equipment. “When you head back into these fields to side dress, spray, cultivate, harvest, etc. over the next several months, we expect that the rows won't be where the AutoPath lines think they are,” Landmark wrote to its customers, referring to the John Deere GPS guidance tool.  “It is most likely going to be difficult - if not impossible - to make AutoPath work in these fields as the inaccuracy is most likely inconsistent.”

For Kenney, the incident is more evidence of the many hidden costs of precision ag technology.

“I think it's kind of funny that the old guys that never invested in any of this technology are still blazing trails with their old tractors using mechanical markers,” he wrote.

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