View From The Cab

By David Tollefson, Columnist

In the March 9, 2023 edition of DTNAg online, Dan Miller has a futuristic presentation of his company’s offerings for the future of farming.

Many of you have heard of Trimble – they are an American company but do business world-wide in at least eight different industries, but the main two are Agricultural and Construction.

I happen to have a Trimble steering device on my John Deere tractor to guide the tractor steering wheel as I go back and forth in the field doing tillage, fertilizing, or planting.

I first bought what was known as a “light bar,” where you physically steer the tractor from a display in front of your steering wheel. When your path is lined up correctly in a straight line, the light would indicate green rather than red. It guides off a globe on the roof of the tractor. The display, again as indicated above, also has a color display that paints a picture as you go through the field.

After using the light bar for a couple years or so, it is ok, for instance, for spreading fertilizer on a 50-foot spacing. It does not matter much if you are a foot or so off the desired distance.

Soon I was wishing for a more accurate, automatic way of following the desired path and distance between passes across the field. I invested in more Trimble equipment that would steer the tractor by itself. A bracket was installed under the steering wheel that would hold a small motor with a small two-inch wheel with a soft surface that would engage the actual steering wheel of the tractor, to do the guidance. This was in lieu of buying the actual John Deere assembly which would work through the oil of the steering system, without actually moving the steering wheel itself. So, while this system may look a bit crude to a casual observer, it works just fine for me.

In a recent Trimble “Ag Partner Connections Conference” in Fort Myers, Fla., they presented a discussion led by Trimble’s Vice President for Product Management, Agriculture, Dave Britton. Following is in part, what is coming in the future of farming and agriculture:

Britton pointed to the large amount of data collected through autonomous machines. For example, he said a self-driving car generates 40 terabytes an hour while driving on the road. That’s about the same as 1,000 to 2,000 iPhones in the same amount of time.

“But it’s data not really doing any work.  That’s what’s exciting about autonomy in agriculture. You’re going to combine self-driving with a lot of data,” Britton said. “So, when you start thinking about the challenges and the ways that we’re going to have to operate, in order to be successful in using this data, it’s really dramatic to think about the impact of all the data that is going to be produced off the back of an implement.”

In the broad scope of autonomous applications, Britton said tillage and spraying operations have floated to the top because, while not simple, those practices are not as complex or data thick as, for example, the harvest process. He said harvesting will be among the last farming functions brought into the world of autonomy because of its complexity – a machine that would be self-driving and intelligent about various harvest volumes, qualities and even, grain types.

Britton offered additional insight into automation and autonomous farming operations. Here are four:

1. SELF-DRIVING

“Autonomy is an act that is a combination of self-driving and intelligence,” he said.

2. AUTONOMY AS AUTOMATIONS

“When we get into automated workflow, we figured out how to get a practice to move through each step.”

3. GEOFENCNG

“In order to safely execute self-driving and autonomy in the field, we have to have a boundary within which the machine knows it can’t exit, Britton said. “Once we have a boundary around the field that the machine knows it cannot exit, we can then move into path planning.

It’s also about obstacles. One of the most interesting things about this is that obstacles are not created equal. It’s very easy to put a point on the map and say there’s an obstacle. It’s a very different thing to say that obstacle is a 20-foot telephone pole or it’s just a rock. Is it something the boom can travel over? Or is it something that you’re going to run into? But you have to have that additional information to be able to make the appropriate decisions. Path planning requires a lot of contextual information from the field for us to be able to design the most effective ways in which it’s operated. We’re also working on ways to make sure that the operator preferences can be included in the path. We all know that operators have preferences for the way they make turns and those types of things.”

4. PERCEPTION

“So, we’ve got a boundary. We’ve got a plan. Now we need perception,” Britton explained. “Perception is incredibly complex.  There is a huge amount of information to ingest. It’s ‘I can identify whether that is something I want to drive over or not.’

When you’re driving a car on the road, there are very few situations where the car will make the decision to run something over,” he added. “Nearly every time the car is figuring to stop, how can it get off the path it was on safely and then get back on the path. We don’t really want to have to have tractors trying to figure out where to go to get around something. There’s going to be situations where we purposely want to to drive over things, where it’s identified the problem and it needs to know it’s okay to drive through that, like a harvest application. So, it isn’t as simple as just stop, we’re going to have to be able to provide enough contextual information for the machines to know whether it continues or whether to stop and call for help.”

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Time will tell whether these technical “gizmos” will catch on. If it’s like autosteer, a very high percentage of farmers today use them every day they are in the fields. I surely hate when occasionally a technical problem happens and I have to steer the old way.

But on my system, I can still guide by the lights (green and red) or also by the display if that is working.

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Please contact David Tollefson with thoughts or comments on this or future columns at: adtollef@hcinet.net