While most of us were gleefully chasing down the Northern Lights last weekend, the New York Times (via Yahoo News) reports on another side…

The powerful geomagnetic storm that cast the northern lights’ vivid colors across the Northern Hemisphere over the weekend also caused some navigational systems in tractors and other farming equipment to break down at the height of planting season, suppliers and farmers said.

Many farmers have come to rely on the equipment, which uses GPS and other navigational technology and helps them to plant more efficiently and precisely by keeping rows straight and avoiding gaps or overlap. But over the weekend, some of those operations in the Midwest, as well as in other parts of the United States and Canada, temporarily ground to a halt.

In Minnesota, some farmers who had planned to spend Friday night sowing seeds were hamstrung by the outages. “I’ve never dealt with anything like this,” said Patrick O’Connor, owner of a farm about 80 miles south of Minneapolis that mainly grows corn and soybean.

O’Connor said that after being rained out for two weeks, he got into his tractor around 5 p.m., hoping to spend the night planting corn. When he received a warning about his GPS system, he called a technical help line and was directed to a message saying there was an outage and nothing could be done to fix it.

Ag Web talked about what it means for farmers…

It’s all happening right as farmers are rushing to get the 2024 crop planted.

“The good news is those radio blackouts for GPS may only last for a few hours or half a day,” says Dr. Terry Griffin a Professor & Cropping Systems Economist at Kansas State University. “My message is: if this is a radio blackout then patience is your best bet. Go check the NOAA website and if the planetary K-Index is red instead of green then go have an early lunch.”

Beyond the inconvenience of delayed field work, there could be real dollars lost to such an extended outage.

From an agricultural perspective, Dr. Griffin has been studying the economic impacts of GPS outages for several years. He’s found that even a few hours to half a day of lost GPS signal can come with a cost for farmers. That’s especially true for farmers who miss an optimum planting or harvesting window. Pushing field work later into the season can ultimately cost them yield and performance during the season.

“There are there are some real penalties and real dollars that come into effect when we’re not able to do field work,” Dr. Griffin said.

That said, it depends on the time of year and the regions impacted. A January disruption would likely have less impact than one during planting or harvest.

Dr. Griffin says while GPS satellites have been in use and in orbit for many years – the first launched in 1978 – civilian use of GPS is relatively new.
He believes these new space weather events will come with a learning curve.

“This was the first solar cycle maximum we’ve had that’s going to be big with satellite communications,” Dr. Griffin said. “So, we’re going to find out some things.”

It’s not yet archived but an hour ago, I heard on MPR an interview with the MN farmer from the NY Times article. He talked about how it isn’t just a matter of using the GPS to make sure the rows in the field are straight. The GPS helps keep track of the soil quality, historical needs of the plants and more and distributes seeds and nutrients based location. So it made sense to wait until the solar storm was over rather than forge ahead using “tradition” sowing practices.

Also when asked if he thought this might happen again, the farmer said yes – if it’s happened once, it will likely happen again.

Interesting both in terms of the things the engineers and scientists need to learn about all aspects of precision agriculture and the value that the farmers put on using precision ag tools!