The powerful geomagnetic storm that brought the bright colors of the Northern Lights to the northern hemisphere last weekend caused navigation systems on some tractors and other farm equipment to malfunction at the height of the planting season, suppliers and farmers say.
Many farmers have become dependent on this equipment. The device uses GPS and other navigation technology to help you plant more efficiently and accurately by keeping rows straight and avoiding gaps and overlaps. But over the weekend, some of those operations in the Midwest, other parts of the U.S. and Canada were temporarily halted.
In Minnesota, a power outage hampered some farmers who had planned to sow seeds overnight Friday. “This is the first time anything like this has happened,” said Patrick O'Connor, owner of a farm about 130 miles south of Minneapolis that grows primarily corn and soybeans.
O'Connor said he got into his tractor around 5 p.m. to spend the night planting corn after two weeks of rain. After receiving a warning about his GPS system, he called his technical helpline and received a message that an outage was occurring and could not be fixed.
In Nebraska, another farmer told online technology publication 404 Media that his business had been shut down. “Right now, all the tractors are sitting at the edge of the field and shut down because of the solar storm,” farmer Kevin Kenny said. “There's no GPS,” he added. “We are in the middle of planting corn.”
Solar storms are caused by the intense ejection of charged particles from the sun's surface. When this material is directed toward Earth, it can interact with Earth's magnetic field and create magnetic storms. This weekend's event was the strongest solar storm to reach Earth since October 2003.
Farm equipment suppliers had warned of disruption from the storm. And on Saturday, Landmark Implement, which sells John Deere farm equipment in parts of the Midwest, said the incident had “significantly compromised” the accuracy of some of its systems.
The company said in a statement that it is looking for “tools that can help predict this issue in the future so that we can alert customers that this issue may occur.” The magazine described the storm as a “historic event” rather than one that “requires frequent continued fighting.”
Terry Griffin, an associate professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University, said such storms, although infrequent, are still common in the United States, where most crops are planted using modern guidance systems. He said it was posing a threat to agriculture.
“This is the first time we've had such a strong geomagnetic storm, and we were relying on GPS,” he said, adding that the worst time for a storm like this is during rice-planting season, when precision is required. He pointed out. important. Alternative technologies are being developed, including systems using machine vision and artificial intelligence, and more localized navigation systems that won't collapse in solar storms, Dr. Griffin added.
O'Connor, a Minnesota farmer, said the power outage made him realize how dependent he was on technology that is often taken for granted. He said he might have done that if he didn't. “Find a way to do nothing.”
Instead of planting corn Friday evening, O'Connor said he prepared to plant another field while looking at the “phenomenal” colors in the sky. “It interrupted my evening, but I was still on the scene,” he added.
“You could see all the glow of the aurora borealis.”
