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GPS providing agricultural breakthroughs
Written by Matthew Bauer
Monday, 30 March 2009
Ryan Leonard, a Western Illinois University alumnus and a sales manager at the Kara Company, discussed how McDonough County's agricultural industry would benefit from the use of GPS technology on Thursday, March 26.
The presentation was hosted by Western Illinois' Geographic Information Systems Center at the University of Illinois Extension-McDonough County Office. The Kara Company is a distributer of GPS networks and has worked with Western Illinois since 2005.
"We chose to offer this presentation to continue the education process and provide a service to the area," said Chad Sperry, a geography department faculty associate and GIS Center manager.
Leonard began the presentation by discussing the benefits of using GPS, noting specifically that it is much quicker and requires less manpower because it is mostly operated by satellite.
According to Leonard, the United States currently has 31 satellites orbiting Earth and only 29 of them are actually active.
"The minimum number of satellites needed for our GPS system to work is 24," Leonard said, which includes four satellites in six orbital positions. Each satellite is about 12,500 miles from Earth and works in a 12-hour orbit.
Despite the many benefits, Leonard explained, there are still some minor problems that occur.
A clear line of sight is required to pinpoint your location, so precision and the speed of the measurement might be reduced in highly forested areas. Storm clouds or dust in the atmosphere may interfere with the accuracy of the location, Leonard added.
When errors in precise location occur, however, they are self-corrected by the many base stations, such as the one sitting on top of Tillman Hall, that inform the satellites of the accurate location in relation to a network of base stations. These satellites receive about 20 correction signals per second.
Today, a wide variety of career fields utilize GPS technology, including civil engineering, construction, mapping, surveying, law enforcement and emergency services. Farming is a new in the field of GPS.
Even though GPS technology is relatively young, there is already a big push for it to expand on both national and state levels.
There are many ways that GPS and the GIS Center can benefit the agricultural community, including the ability to know the planting location of seeds to the nearest sixteenth of an inch. As a result, mapping out entire fields would be much easier and more accurate. Other advantages include fertilization and monitoring crop lines.
Senior agricultural science major Tim Brown believes that even though the use of this new science isn't widespread yet, it will become so. "In the future, 10 years down the road, farming with GPS technologies will be more common," Brown said.
Leonard believes educating farmers and other general public about the use of GPS systems is vital as well, because many members of the general public do not know how to use it.
"GPS has a long road ahead of it," Leonard said. Leonard explained there are still advances to be made, noting that GPS technology was still growing.
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