The title. I’m a farmer with a pair of RS+ units and I’ve now got a permanent base setup with an Ardusimple RTK board + RTKBase (GitHub - Stefal/rtkbase: Your own GNSS base station for RTK localization with a Web GUI) and the Emlid Caster. I love having the base always set up and it’s now a very handy device to have in my ute. Surveying fence lines, staking out fence lines, mapping underground pipework (once you lay it) are just some of the jobs I’ve been doing with it recently with the existing toolkit.
I think there’s more that can be done on farms with the units but it would need much more work in development. The idea is that you’d have the unit powered on and with you most of the day you’re out and suppose you find a patch of thistles, you can quickly map exactly where they are to deal with later once you have the equipment to deal with it. That is also a handy use case when you want to spray early in the season where the thistles themselves are very small and hard to find from where they were last year.
I would love it in the orchard looking for leaks in the dripline. I could map where the leaks are in the orchard while the irrigation is running and then find them again when it is off to fix them. Currently we use ground markers and a paper map. The paper can get lost easily, or wet, and then your map is lost.
I think it’s worth researching whether or not farmers could be a market. The reach RX + a local NTRIP source through your caster and they would be set.
The problem is going to be the proprietary nature of the machine control as it is across all industries. There is already a lot of Ag activity here and on LinkedIn that I have seen but there are a LOT of smaller Surveyors, Aerial Mappers and smaller Construction companies to cater to right now. Maybe after they feel they have sufficiently developed Flow for those use cases.
As someone who is looking after just over 3m Acres over a few of our farms (one is over 100km in one direction), I’m very much convinced it has to be essential for property management in general. Allows me to co-ordinate where we should be for new work, repair work, maintenance to fences/pipes/bores/etc.
Not to mention how expensive it is these days to be a farmer, a pair of RS2+'s (and some practice) is all you need to be productive across multiple aspects of managing your property.
This is less about the machine control aspect and more of the mapping of your property. Yesterday, I used a fieldbee autosteering system to map out our new orchard and fencelines using points I staked out using the RS+.
I agree though, the surveyors are going to be their main focus, but the farming industry is arguably much bigger and I don’t think should be slept on. Every farmer I know would use a Reach RX if they knew how and the workflow was right.
That’s what I mostly use mine units ( RS2 permanent base mounted on the shop and RS2+ and RS3 rovers) for farm work, . Staking out fence lines , staking out corrals and buildings plans , footings , and collecting water lines and utilities, I also use it on a motor scraper for levelling and sloping drains and site pads,. We can now mostly count on Flow for all these projects , but if it gets more complex I have the windows version of Field Genius.
Brilliant work, Dave! I love the idea of using the Reach gear on the actual machine itself for large area levelling. I’ve got a task like that coming up in the next 2 or 3 years where I plan to quarry a hill for limestone roads and then flatten out the area left to make a large, gently sloping dam that’s maybe 50x100m. I figured if I get a line along the plane I want to make, the line stake out should be able to tell me how far above the line I am which will help me get my slope for the area, and also my offset to the line to get the width. It’s great to see that you’ve already done it with success.
I don’t have a scraper though, but I do have an excavator and a wheel loader so with enough back and forward, something will happen!
Not about machine control and the next thing you mention is auto-steer. Mapping is pretty much what we all do so mounting a unit to a machine to collect data is also already something you can do. I’ve been mounting receivers to vehicles for 15 years for auto-topo and simple cut/fill.
What am I missing that you are wanting that isn’t already possible?
I’m not at all expecting any machine control implementation by Emlid. I do wish other companies with machine control solutions would allow us to enter coordinates and drive lines between them without parking a tractor over a point staked out but that’s a third party problem.
My ‘farmers as a target market’ spiel is that while we can use the Emlid gear for mapping on our farm, the website sells it as surveyor gear. All of the farmers I know are using RTK autosteering systems. None of them have even considered mapping their farms, utilities, etc with RTK receivers. They don’t know about it, or how they could do it, and if they do, they think it’s going to be prohibitively expensive. The first part is trying to let them know that this exists - target farming field days, do demos get it in the hands of farmers.
The second part, is small changes to the app to suit some use cases. When you know you want to measure or log something in advance, the app is fine in its current state (although polygons would be nice but they are coming). The other use case for farming is when you don’t know you want to be measuring something, but need to quickly.
I’ll give an example of how I would use it in an olive orchard. We’re in tractors driving every row, spraying, slashing or harvesting and while doing that, you get a good look at every tree. There’s 87000 of them so far. Sometimes you’ll see breaks in dripline, dripline that has been pinched off by a sucker, dripline that has drifted too far from the tree line and needs to be pulled in, trees that have been knocked over by the harvester, trees that don’t look like they’re getting enough water, etc. I can’t stop to address these, writing down the location is troublesome as the rows are 400m long and still require searching and regular GPS puts me within 2-3 rows of where the issue is.
In this case, I imagine that a special survey mode where users can pre-define point types with individual buttons like ‘leak’ or ‘bad tree start/stop line’ where a single button logs the position, and type of issue. Later on, in the staking out, you filter by the type of point you’re addressing the issue for and find them all again.
I think when Emlid started… was geared more for GIS but they have been working on the surveyor side since then as many users have shown a huge demand and interest in it. Which is posing quite a bit of additional expertise needed… which is why the Survey subscription i personally feel is rolling out too slow. Survey software is pretty deep.
The Emlid products are useful in many different fields including agricultural. Users are utilizing them in their own ways with many apps and solutions that have been already readily available.
Seems an experienced agricultural company would be best suited to create a turnkey solution utilizing Emlid products? Or team up with Emlid?
I don’t want a solution from a separate ag company as I can bet the software gets abandoned quickly and Flow has 90% of what is needed already. Of the 1200 or so ‘friends’ on Facebook, about a hundred are farmers, and only one is a surveyor at a mine site. I see the farming industry worldwide as a very good market for Emlid to consider and I reckon it’s bigger than the mapping industry. At the price point Emlid sells their equipment, it’s very accessible.
This post is about saying ‘hey Emlid, if you aren’t already looking at farmers, you should because there’s a massive market there who don’t know about your product’
You can predefine codes and take almost instant shots. Are you saying you can’t stop for five seconds to capture that feature? You’re wanting to place a shot manually after you have already passed it? I’m still not hearing anything that isn’t already possible except for having an easy button on the main screen already programmed with a specific description of all the things that you just described I don’t see how there can be a button for everything. As it is you have 4 clicks.
Yes, I don’t want to stop for 5 seconds. If you’re slashing, not a big deal. If you’re spraying, yes it is a big deal. You’re applying herbicides at particular rates which are hard to keep consistent if you’re starting and stopping. The worst is glyphosate under the trees to keep the grasses away from the drip line but the trees themselves do get a bit of spray on them, but they are far more tolerant to glyphosate than the grasses are. If you have to stop and start all the time, you’re starting and stopping the spray and risking over applying or missing sections.
In this case, being a meter or so out isn’t a huge deal as you’ll very easily find it again. It takes 30 hours to drive the orchard and you do multiple passes per year. It would be incredible to use those hours looking at trees to log and map the issues as they’re seen.
The app is very good for what it can do. I’m only describing a potential use case that looks like it doesn’t apply very well in your work, but would in mine.
This is all ready possible with any of the ag gps rtk displays.
I use older Agleader Insight displays to apply herbicides in pastures. They have a way to pre setup pins that can be dropped at any time while spraying. these pins can be labeled what you want and by two taps of the screen put down a pin with the observed problem.
Then when you want to make the repairs put the monitor, wiring harness and RS in the vehicle your taking and drive to the pins and make the repairs.
