Technology's fine, as long as it works...

 

Underlining the vulnerability of the world's food supply is this news from Australia.  A tip o' the hat to Andrew for the link.

Tractors have ground to a halt in paddocks across Australia and New Zealand because of a signal failure in the satellite farmers use to guide their GPS-enabled machinery, stopping them from planting their winter crop.

The satellite failure on Monday was a bolt from the blue for farmers in NSW and Victoria, who were busy taking advantage of optimal planting conditions for crops including wheat, canola, oats, barley and legumes.

“You couldn’t have picked a worse time for it,” said Justin Everitt, a grain grower in the Riverina who heads NSW Farmers’ grains committee.

. . .

Tractors that pull seed-planting machinery, as well as the massive combine harvesters that reap Australia’s vast grain crops, are high-tech beasts that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They are enabled with GPS tracking and can be guided to an accuracy within two centimetres, enabling seed-planting equipment to sow crops with precision to drive up efficiency, prevent wastage and boost environmental sustainability.

All that went out the window when the Inmarsat-41 satellite signal failed.

Katie McRobert, general manager at the Australia Farm Institute, said Australian farmers sourced their GPS signal from one satellite, which was a critical risk to rural industries.

“Having all your GPS eggs in one basket is a vulnerability on a good day, and a fatal weakness on a bad one,” McRobert said.

. . .

“This is crippling for the farm community,” Groves said ... “GPS is our guidance system that eliminates overlapping [in rows of seeds] and over-application of chemicals, and when that system is down, the machine is literally down.

“My planter is 32 rows wide; if I overlap by just two rows, that is 4 per cent I am losing out on. When you’re paying $1300 [a tonne] for fertiliser, that really adds up very quickly.

“My crop sprayer relies on the GPS signal to tell the spray unit how much chemical to put on, where it is in the paddock and how many nozzles it needs working.”

There is no indication when the problem will be fixed.

There's more at the link.

Australia and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand are critical agricultural suppliers to the rest of the world.  If their planting is impacted, so will be their harvest, and the availability of food for export.

Couple that news with the the latest on the world rice harvest.

From China to the U.S. to the European Union, rice production is falling and driving up prices for more than 3.5 billion people across the globe, particularly in Asia-Pacific – which consumes 90% of the world’s rice.

The global rice market is set to log its largest shortfall in two decades in 2023, according to Fitch Solutions.

And a deficit of this magnitude for one of the world’s most cultivated grains will hurt major importers, analysts told CNBC.

“At the global level, the most evident impact of the global rice deficit has been, and still is, decade-high rice prices,” Fitch Solutions’ commodities analyst Charles Hart said.

. . .

There’s a short supply of rice as a result of the ongoing war in Ukraine, as well as bad weather in rice-producing economies like China and Pakistan.

In the second half of last year, swaths of farmland in the world’s largest rice producer China were plagued by heavy summer monsoon rains and floods. 

The accumulated rainfall in the country’s Guangxi and Guangdong province, China’s major hubs of rice production, was the second highest in at least 20 years, according to agriculture analytics company Gro Intelligence.

Similarly, Pakistan — which represents 7.6% of global rice trade — saw annual production plunge 31% year-on-year due to severe flooding last year, said the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), labeling the impact as “even worse than initially expected.”

Again, more at the link.

The world's food supply is under dire threat due to all sorts of circumstances, as has been pointed out by national and international organizations for the past couple of years.  These latest developments make the food security situation all the more difficult, particularly for Asian nations that are utterly dependent on rice as the staple food for their populations.  They're going to bid up the price of any food they can get their hands on to ridiculously high levels, rather than have their people starving and rising in revolt against their governments.  That, in turn, means exports of food to the USA will be under extreme stress.

Got preps?

Peter