Farmers Power Up PDAs To Replace Pen and Clipboard

[Ed Hansberry]

<a href="http://www.itbusiness.ca/index.asp?theaction=61&sid=52020">http://www.itbusiness.ca/index.asp?theaction=61&sid=52020</a><br /><br />"A Canadian software firm has helped a subsidiary of DuPont plant the seeds of technology for its agronomists in the field. FieldWorker Products Ltd., a Toronto-based software company specializing in application development tools for handheld computers, has provided Pioneer Hi-Bred International Inc. with a tool set that enables its agronomists to capture field-scouting observations using a PDA."<br /><br />The article doesn't specify what type of PDA they are using but it really doesn't matter. It is just cool to see this technology work its way into this section of our economy. I can see the deals at the John Deere store now. Buy a 9520T 450hp tractor starting at $231,154 and get an iPAQ 5450 free! :D

[jizmo]

Someone could develope a game for milking cows as fast as possible which could then be connected wirelessly to the milking robot with real cows in the barn.

I could imagine bunch of farmers, gathered around one player, trying to psyche him out!

"Remember, Earn. When you reach level two, you mu.. PSYCHE!!" :lol:

/jizmo

[Timothy Rapson]

I read a year ago an entry from a farmer in Europe who used a PDA connected to satelite GPS. His PDA could tell him practically to the individual seeds how many he needed to buy each year for his field.

You could enter data for a low wet spot ine field and find out how much tile was needed to drain the field or if it was blocked or such. Really cool stuff. Farming is not what it was when my Grandmother bought her 120 acre plot for $100 in 1940 rural Michigan.

[mekmek]

This is not a product for farmers. This appears to be a product to help Pioneer technicians monitor plant trials at research sites.

Farmers do use a variety of GPS based, and portable computing products to help optimize field work - I know they had them as far back as the mid 70's. I remember hearing a decade ago about portable farm GPS systems that link harvest yield data to planting equipment to minimize fertilizer application requirements. Maybe some of that stuff can now link into a PDA. If someone wrote a maintenance monitoring PPC program for farm machinery, I wouldn't doubt that a ruggedized PPC might be included in a tractor purchase.

[Rob Alexander]

This is not a product for farmers. This appears to be a product to help Pioneer technicians monitor plant trials at research sites.

Farmers do use a variety of GPS based, and portable computing products to help optimize field work - I know they had them as far back as the mid 70's. I remember hearing a decade ago about portable farm GPS systems that link harvest yield data to planting equipment to minimize fertilizer application requirements. Maybe some of that stuff can now link into a PDA. If someone wrote a maintenance monitoring PPC program for farm machinery, I wouldn't doubt that a ruggedized PPC might be included in a tractor purchase.

It's happening here. The folks in the Precision Agriculture Unit in our College of Science use iPaqs with a GPS sleeve to control almost every aspect of the tractor. They link it with GIS data that has all of the soil, slope, etc. information and the ipaq tells the tractor how much of a given product to apply meter-by-meter.