Retail Remedies: Up Your N Game with GPS Solutions

Editor’s note: This article is part of CropLife’s new series called Retail Remedies. In Retail Remedies content, we offer solutions and strategies for ag retailers to present to their grower-customers to make dealing with all the uncertainty of the 2022 planting season more manageable. This will include stories on product segments — like the GPS-nitrogen management feature below — that can help growers stretch their hard-earned dollars in this time of higher crop input costs.

Few other ways allow you to make your land do more for you, more easily and cost effectively, than GPS solutions.

CenterPoint RTX correction service.

In the past, growers and applicators traded performance for ease of use — but a productivity-destroying 45-minute wait for a satellite service startup is thankfully no longer the only option. Trimble Inc.’s new CenterPoint RTX correction service cuts convergence time up to 75% globally to just a couple of minutes, with 1 inch/2.5 cm accuracy.

“If you’re driving without a subscription (to a correction service,) you’re accurate within a few feet. To go from a few feet to an inch, that’s huge on costs. With the advances, it’s easier to get accuracy that’s needed,” says Michael Bruno, Trimble Strategic Marketing manager. “It’s wild to see in 10 years this evolution.”

The faster convergence is made possible by the inclusion of the BeiDou-III (BDS-III) constellation, which increases the overall satellites used by 25%. These additional satellites, combined with Trimble’s newly released ProPoint technology on the NAV-900 GNSS guidance controller and the CenterPoint RTX service, deliver up to 40% greater positioning availability in challenging environments, including along treelines and gullies, according to the company.

“As long as (growers) have that subscription, their accuracy is covered. They don’t have to worry about the base station, the cell connection, or moving between fields. It’s there in the background, everywhere they work, and so they can address the things that are keeping them up, like inputs and commodities,” Bruno adds.

Unveiled at last summer’s Farm Progress show, Hemisphere GNSS in the spring started shipping the Outback Guidance MaveriX Precision AG solution, which is built around the new MaveriX agriculture application software platform, providing state-of-the-art guidance, steering, and application control.

Simplicity is number-one for Outback Guidance and it is what customers love the most about its solutions, compared with some competitor products that may be viewed as over-engineered, Darren Pritchard, Director of Sales with Outback, tells CropLife.

Outback Guidance MaveriX Precision AG solution.

“Farmers only use it two to three weeks a year. They forget about it for six to eight months. It has to be easy; they flip it on and it works,” he says of MaveriX, which offers unmatched accuracy on the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) with Hemisphere GNSS Atlas L-Band correction service or RTK corrections. Moreover, customers are after the value — “You get the eDriveM1, ESi2 Electric Wheel, a M7 7-inch touchscreen, and A631 $7,500.”

“It is a really short time window (that a farmer has available for field work during the season,)” Roland Moelder, Product Manager with Hemisphere GNSS, adds. “Often, our customers are not full-time farmers. If you have long hours and you’re working in the dark, it takes away the strain of trying to drive in a straight line. It’s another item that’s hard to measure with actual data — we think it’s a big benefit.”

In today’s high-input cost environment, it’s all about overlap. “Every foot of overlap is just money out the window,” Pritchard says. “You start doing the math on a 2,000-3,000-acre farm in western Canada to reduce 6 inches of overlap with today’s input costs, it doesn’t take long to pay for a system for like this. The straighter you are, the less overlap you have, the less you waste.”

More Solutions For Ag Retailers

Crop-sensing technology in cereal and grain crops is another solution for the ag retail space and a fast-growing segment in precision farming.

For Topcon Positioning Systems, what’s old is new with its CropSpec technology. The crop canopy sensors give real time crop health indications, and with an agronomist involved, can up the retailer or growers’ nitrogen use game, says Ryan Pieper, Channel Manager, North America. Similar in nature to Trimble’s GreenSeeker, CropSpec is mounted on the roof of the cab instead of onto the spray boom, and shoots a beam of light down into the crop, ultimately providing a picture of crop health and creating an algorithm allowing the user to adjust nitrogen usage according to a plant’s health.

While Topcon has enjoyed global success with CropSpec, it has not yet taken the product through the ag retail channel in the U.S. — the goal is to change that, Pieper says.

“Interest is going up (in CropSpec) due to the current climate and, how do I do more with less? How do I do a better job and how do I improve workflow efficiency?” Pieper tells CropLife. The solution is coupled with a brand-agnostic modem, which can be plugged into any competitor display, and sends the prescription to a machine. The idea is that the agronomist is in the office building prescriptions, and the user can wirelessly send the prescription to a machine, he explains.