Page 34—Corn Talk, Lancaster Farming, Saturday, Otetober 10, 1998 FARM MAPPING WHO NEEDS IT? DAVID WAGNER Penn State Ag & •Bioengineering Several years ago, I start ed asking people I met, “How do you know where you are? Geographically speaking, that is.” I was surprised at the answers I received. Some people would reference their location to a major landmark, others would reference them selves to a distance and a direction from north, like “we live 10.5 miles northwest of the center of Phillipsburg.” Still others (usually geog raphers or engineers) would give a set of coordinates such as “I am at 40 and a half degrees north latitude and about 78 degrees west longi tude.” Still others, when asked how to get to their work, or home or to the store, might say, “it’s over there (pointing vaguely with their finger).” Others, say with utter sincerity and if checked by their performance, used the sun as a positioning and direction instrument. That’s OK as long as the sun is shin ing or it is daytime. Now, I’ve met a lot of farm ers, when asked where the ground was the wettest, or where a patch of weeds were located in his field, could walk me right to the spot, but when asked how they knew where they were standing in the field, could not give a con sistent and precise answer - but they knew exactly how to get to a certain problem locat ed in the field. The point is this, in today’s emerging agricultural pcq duction arena, many differ ent people are interfacing in acquiring data from the field (soil characteristics, nutrient levels, yield from grain com bines, topography (elevation), and weed/pest outbreaks). These people may not be the farmer that has driven all the farm machinery over those fields for the last 30 years. In evaluating the field data and making decisions about chemical application, manure application, nutrient applica tion, we have to have a com- mon language that can be used to personally discuss the interpretation of the data and to make management deci sions, and also to program or control the farm machinery to apply those crop inputs we discussed. We need a system of keep ing track of where we are and how to get to the next place, so that both humans and machines can communicate with sufficient accuracy that the chemicals and crop inputs get to approximate correct location in the field.d There are two considerations: 1) a consistent set of location al guidelines and, 2) an understanding of the accura cy of the specific location wc I think we are talking about, when we decide to apply some manure or chemical, or - even the seed population. That is why farm mapping is becoming much more impor tant. There are two kinds of data, spatial data - such as a location point on the surface of the earth (like in the mid dle of a com field where a sink hole is developing), and attribute data (descriptive data) that describes a condi tion, like “wet, dry, clay, loam, red, green, but - you get the idea.” Farm mapping systems can be simple, such as a hand drawn sketch that give the reader an approximate sense of the location and character istic of some place in a field. Farm mapping systems can be complex, using computers and geographic information systems (GIS) to store digital maps in the GIS database.• Each of the digital maps, is* characterized by a common set of locational (spatial) characteristics, so that the different digital maps can be referenced to each other. That is the purpose of GIS - to keep track of each loca tion in one specific map can be located on each of the other maps, lb visualize this, if you had a stack of trans parent maps of the same field, you could lay each map on top of the other, a single location in a field would form one single point if you were above the map stack and looked down through the dig ital map layers. That is called “piercing,” so we could elec tronically chose any point in a field, say where there was a weed problem, and electroni cally, look down through each layer - the soil, nutrients, yield, weed, pest maps, and data at that location in each map layer could give us an insight as to the probable cause of the problem. .. . ‘$OW-we could talk about the geographic data and coor dinate system?, euch as lati tude and longitude, and the datums, and geoids that allow us to use a consistent set of distances and coordi nates. But if we are going to get into the precision agricul- f Ml MHWO PENNSYLVANIA MASTER CORN GROWERS ASSOC., INC. THERE'S STILL TIME FOR THIS SEASON’S CROP • Weight-Tromx • Bucket Elevators Feed Mill • Stirring Systems • Transport Augers • Utility Augers Call Us For Your Grain Dryer Service Work - WESTFIELD GRAIN AUGERS Quality Product At An affordable Pricel m STOCK NOW! Season Clearance on Westfield Augers. Call for pricing. ■■■■■Pl Commercial myyymjj Auger m * 14 OA GALVANIZED TUBING 10 GA HEAVY DUTY FLIGHTING HEAVY DUTY SPIDER CAGE QUARD IN STOCK 4", 6", 8” Augers, 10” Available ★Full Line Parts Dept.* ★Sell, Service A Install* ture age, we need to use com puters and spatial (location al) data that is universal in its ability to allow any per son, or computer, or agricul tural machine to understand where the point of interest is located or “where we are,” We need these computer based farm mapping systems that use GPS-derived loca tional data and a system of common coordinates so that we can store digital and loca tional information about the production fields. By using computer-based farm man agement systems, we can, from year-to-year, always be able to refer to the same place in the field with accura cy. We will talk much more about this in “farm-mapping" technology in future articles. &L EAIHBMg • Feed Bins • Wet Tanks • Gram Bins (jSSj) AUTOMATIC BATCH OR CONTINUOUS FLOW GRAIN DRYERS fttepSf! • 2. Parts and Service per Sale $189.99 Also Available: PreAgro Model 55 Digital Grain Tester Which Automatically Compensates For Temperature / ir sizes / DURABLE ASS SPQUT 1 OR 2 GROOVE PULLEV DURABLE ONE PIECE MOTofc MOUNT Rt. 272 South 14 Herrvllle Road Willow Street, PA 17584 Ph. 717-464-3321 or Toll Free 800-732-0053 Mon.-Frl. 6:30 am to 6 pm • Air Drying Systems • Gram Dryers • Parts 4 Motors The Competitive Edge “Smart system" eliminates guesswork. COMMERCIAL HEAVY DUTY SEALED BEARING FULLY ADJUSTABLE MOTOBMOUNT POWDER COAT LONG LASTING iICE as Hardware UPS Shipping Point 10/3
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers