As if we didn't have enough problems with our food supply already, it appears that the recent solar storms have created new difficulties for farmers.
The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season.
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“All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now shut down because of the solar storm,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer in Nebraska, told me. “No GPS. We’re right in the middle of corn planting. I’ll bet the commodity markets spike Monday.”
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“Due to the way the RTK network works, the base stations were sending out corrections that have been affected by the geomagnetic storm and were causing drastic shifts in the field and even some heading changes that were drastic,” the dealership told farmers Saturday morning. “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. This will only affect the fields that are planted during times of reduced accuracy. 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.”
These automated systems have become critical to modern farming (often called “precision agriculture”), with farmers using increasingly automated tractors to plant crops in perfectly straight lines with uniform spacing. Precision agriculture has greatly increased the yield of farms, and a 2023 report by the US Department of Agriculture noted that more than 50 percent of corn, cotton, rice, sorghum, soybeans, and winter wheat are planted and harvested with “automated guidance.” Many modern tractors essentially steer themselves, with the oversight of a farmer in the cab. If the planting or harvesting is even slightly off, the tractors or harvesters could damage crops or plant crooked or inconsistently, which can cause problems during the growing season and ultimately reduce yield.
There's more at the link.
I called a couple of farming friends and asked them about this. All agreed that for the big commercial farms, it might be a very serious problem indeed. It seems that big automated tractors and other machinery electronically map the location of the seed rows they plant, and use those maps throughout the growing season to navigate to them to spread fertilizer, pull weeds, and eventually harvest the crop. If the initial maps are not accurate, then future work on those seeds might miss them by feet or yards, meaning that they won't be properly fertilized and protected during their growth. The harvest from those rows might be reduced substantially as a result.
Can farmers compensate manually for this failure of their automated systems? I have no idea. I presume that once seeds start to grow, the plants can be seen with the naked eye and fertilized, weeded, etc. accordingly, but how many commercial farms are set up to work that way? As far as I know, most of them reduce their workers to a bare minimum prior to harvest, because automated systems do most of the work formerly done by hand. If they have to revert to the old ways to care for a proportion of their crops, is that even possible today? Do they have enough staff and older-style equipment to do so?
Another question is, how many farms, and how many seed rows, have been affected? If farmers planted (say) 10% or 20% of their crops for this year in an inaccurate fashion, will yields be reduced by a similar proportion? That might be disastrous for contracts, futures trades, exports, and all sorts of other industries that rely on farm production as an input for their own business activities. What's more, I don't know whether crop insurance, that would pay out if bad weather, drought, fire, etc. affected a farm's production, will pay out over navigational errors like this. I don't think the problem has ever arisen before, so it's possible the insurance policies don't even mention the issue.
I suspect smaller farms won't be as badly affected, as they're less likely to be able to afford the (very expensive) GPS-guided farm equipment involved. However, they also don't produce a large proportion of the crops in this country. "Big Ag" might be in for a torrid time this harvest season - and what will that do to food prices and availability, not just in this country, but around the world? Commercial farms all over the world use the same technology these days, so the issue is unlikely to be confined to the USA.
Yet another reason, IMHO, to make sure our emergency preparations include a reasonable amount of food in reserve, just in case. I'm going to keep an eye on the cost of frozen and canned vegetables, flour, etc. I suspect some may become a lot more expensive as shortages bite.
Peter
17 comments:
Interesting. The Geomagnetic storm lasted from Friday around noon until 2AM on Sunday morning - both in Eastern time. Let's be generous and say it was 48 hours long but it was more like 36 hours.
So they're saying that two days of not being able to do exactly what they expect to do exactly when they expect to do it is going to cripple the farms' production?
Are we really that dependent on this technology that we can't slip the schedule by two days? Plant two days later and harvest two days later?
Thank you for the heads up on this. Definitely wouldn't have heard about it otherwise, wasn't aware of this type of farming method nor of how the solar activity affected it. I'll be trying to adjust my prepping accordingly.
Hope you are feeling a little better every day.
I'm with SiGraybeard on this. No way 2 days of reduced GPS accuracy will have a long term effect on crops. Sounds like just another doom story to rile up the masses. Human beings, especially of the American variety, are incredibly adept at adaptation. I'm sure the farmers figured this out and worked around the inconvenience.
Commercial corn farmers do quality checks by going out in the planted rows during seeding and digging up a sample of planted seeds to ensure depth and spacing are maintained. They use GPS for sure but they always check before during and after planting. The other thing to consider is that the vast majority of mid west american agriculture that uses all this automation is tied up in commercial corn and soybeans which aren't really food - they are ethanol and processed food precursors. The small amout of American Ag that actually grows food other than grains isn't so dependent on GPS. You don't have to replant an apple tree or a berry bush every year. Spuds might be an issue but again - commercial potatoes are largley a monoculture used for french fries. I recommend hitting up your local farmers market and eating local.
weather can prevent them from planting as well, is a single storm that lasts 2 days going to cripple the farms' production?
Unless a farmer is using fully-autonomous equipment (no operator station), and unless on-board guidance systems have changed radically in the past five years (last time I was around one), they can simply manually operate the tractor, sprayer and combine the same way they were doing before GPS. Sure, yields may be down a bit from the lack of precision the GPS systems provide, but no-one's looking at a crop failure here.
Having grown up on an upper midwestern dairy farm; I am qualified to speak on this topic. I cry/holler/scream BS on this. The Global Positioning System that is used in today's farming CAN be "disengaged". Thereby allowing the farmer to continue planting. Although the rows won't be as straight or maybe the fertilizer rate won't be on point.
Oh and planting a couple of days later, could mean a yield reduction of 10-15%. And when you are dealing with 250-300 bushels per acre, that could be the profit for that year.
Yeap, so called journalists with no idea of real world life, are crying like Chicken Little.
A two day delay can turn into a week depending on weather. It has started raining in this part of Missouri and will continue to do so the fields will be wet all week.
I work for a smaller fertilizer company and I asked the boss this morning if he had heard of any of our customers being affected by the outage and he had not.
We’ve slowed down dramatically since a lot of our customers were planting the first week of May wrapping up early part of second week, but I don’t know what our Nebraska, north and South Dakota customers are doing.
Turn the GPS off, drive the tractor like it was never invented. Didn't have GPS for hundreds of years & got the planting done.
Corn might be up at the end of the year or early next year anyhow because of lack of farmers planting it now. Corn prices have been down drastically and a lot of corn gets planted on futures contracts not what market will be in the fall. A lot of our customers are not planting corn because of the expense of fertilizer involved so the low commodity prices will not turn a profit.
To answer the question if 2 days is enough to effect a harvest, the answer is potentially yes. If they just lost 2 days right now it may or may not be problematic, the larger issue is if the ground can't be worked longer due to rain, etc then yeah. Growing up on a dairy farm I can tell you that sometimes 2 days is all of a window you have between planting and letting it go fallow for the year. The other issue is if the GPS and other things are damaged well, that's stuff up in orbit, takes longer to get up there or longer to repair damage. And these big farms effected by this likely don't have a whole lot of people that can "manually" do the driving with any effect, sorta like how most people these days have no clue how to drive a manual transmission on a car or truck. This is in addition to any possible weather related crop loss down the road on stuff that was planted.
The self driving cars also rely on GPS. I will never own one unless it can be disabled.
Ten years ago I was reading about high auction prices for older tractors that could be repaired in the field by farmers, instead of newer hitech models that needed technicians to reprogram the things when they broke down. I have older vehicles for the same reason. The comments above seem to make sense to someone who doesn't know anything about farming , except every farmer I've ever met did his or her own electrical and mechanical work, and not badly at that, which leads me to think they would adapt and soldier on under less than optimum conditions. The John Deere dealership told the farmers in this case, if these systems are in widespread use elsewhere in the world I wonder how communicative the vendors are going to be about potential yield problems due to equipment failure from a solar storm, some times and places you talk about something and then you get blamed for it. And they have to sell farming stuff to those farmers next year. The bearer of bad news is likewise unwelcome.
War, weather, and communal planning have trashed agricultural yields in the recent past, but there's always been a bumper crop elsewhere to offset the aggregate shortfall. Often the United States filled the world's calorie gap. Our nutritive might is beyond accurate description, at least by me, but there's problems which we must deal with if we are to continue operating the world's soupline. Doubt this is the last or the worst of them.
rick m
We live in ID about 10 miles from Canada. We had a great light show and had zero issues with the grid, GPS, cell phones, Internet access, or any other electronics. I'm surprised other parts of the country had problems.
I wonder if they could just re-do the "seeding procedure" on those specific plots, only minus the actual seeds. I'm sure it would be a "double work pain-in-the-ass" and would represent some cost, but if the accurate maps are essential for fertilizing, weeding and harvesting, it might be worth it depending on how much acreage is involved. They might have to wait until the seeds sprout and they can see them to rerun accurately. Disclaimer: I do not use big, complicated tractors and my organic "prepper garden" is 200 square feet, planted by hand. Everything is looking good out there as of today.
I suspect that's a lot of fearmongering hogwash, but if it's actually that bad, it's almost like the big commercial farms figured out a way to become so dependent on GPS for everything, they turned all their food-growing efforts into an enterprise with a single point of failure.
Because who could have ever foreseen GPS going wonky?!?
Brilliant!
Top. Men.
Clearly, Idiocracy was a documentary.
I was just a small-scale farmer, but one thing I learned (and quick) was to have a backup for *everything*. My 'real' farmer friend that I helped with harvest, on more than one occasion, shut the GPS system off because it was "wonky" (and not due to weather). He'd still pull in 250+ bushel corn, even without the GPS.
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