Friday, May 23, 2014

Planting the corn used to be so simple...

Planting the corn used to be so simple...  Now it involves $400,000 computer-driven tractors, advanced geolocation systems far more accurate than GPS, computer-controlled seed drills, iPads, and software and data in the cloud.

There's not much corn planted here in Paradise.  The large fields here tend to be planted in forage crops, especially alfalfa and oats.  Even with these crops we're starting to see some hi-tech innovations.  Yesterday, for example, I watch a ginormous tractor spraying an oat field.  The spray booms extended roughly 50' on each side of the tractor, and I saw individual nozzles being turned on and off (presumably by computer) to avoid double-spraying or missing any piece of the crop...

No comments:

Post a Comment