Vincent Blake | November 13, 2007
THE quickest way between two points is a straight line, but sticking to that straight line was a problem for Matthew Wehr.
Matthew Wehr uses GPS on his farm
Three years ago, he invested $14,000 in a Trimble AgGPS EZ-Steer, a GPS device that grabs the tractor's steering wheel and points it in a straight line, whether he is sowing, fertilising, spraying or harvesting.
"When you're not overlapping you're saving on fuel, fertiliser and chemicals, if you're using it for spraying," he says. "You put in an A-B line, as such, to define a straight line in the paddock, program in the width of the implement and it tracks backwards on the same mark.
"You have to turn it manually at each end, but once you get back on that line it holds it on that line," he says.
"You can make it follow a curve if you are contour ploughing, or you can go round and round and it will do an axis if you're doing pivot sprinkler systems."
It saved a lot of fatigue "because you do not have to physically steer the thing.
"With some of the more advanced systems you can map out each paddock and it will remember where poles and trees are and will steer around them next time - if you're lucky.
"Everybody is getting into GPS now. It used to be only the bigger blokes that were doing it, but as the units get cheaper more and more people are going with them.
"Fertiliser is up to $700 a tonne. You only have to be overlapping 30cm every run, and if you work that out over a year it could be a quarter of a tonne of fertiliser. Then there's the diesel fuel cost."
He is not interested in computers, but he is well informed when it comes to what GPS can do for a man on the land.
"You can program them so that when you are harvesting the paddock it will recall what the yield is, and if you have the equipment and the computer program you can run that program when you're fertilising and it will put more fertiliser in that spot.
"That's pretty hi-tech," Wehr says.