Australian grain growers are reflecting on their enormous reliance on GPS technology in the wake of intermittent satellite outages earlier in the month.
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There were issues across the country, especially on the east coast and South Australia, after technical difficulties with the Immersat 1-451 satellite, which, although rectified have farmers thinking of contingencies if there are further outages.
"People have said it's just a matter of grabbing hold of the steering wheel and using it again, but it isn't that simple," said South Australian farmer and Grain Producers SA board member John Gladigau, Alawoona, near Loxton.
"Obviously you can take control of the wheel and do things manually but if you're doing things like variable rate input application or taking maps you can't do it and you lose those efficiencies which can be the difference between profit and loss.
"To suggest it was only an issue because farmers were slack was a little bit condescending."
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He said the technology used in cropping systems now was "amazing" but added the outages highlighted that farm businesses were more reliant on the technology than they may have thought.
"GPS and autosteer are now over 20 years old and normal technology and it is far more than just the comfort of the tractor driver that is impacted when it is down," Mr Gladigau said.
"It becomes far more difficult to perform precise operations such as inter row sowing, if you're spraying you could see up to 5 to 10 per cent overlap, which then translates to the same rise in percentage term costs for chemical, fuel and labour.
"This is only highlighting the duplication, misses can be even more problematic with weeds and disease going uncontrolled."
There were also issues with paddock data using the prescription maps generated by GPS data.
"The ability for a seeder to sow according to a prescription map, with different rates on different soil types, or fertiliser use matched to the removal of nutrients according to the previous years harvest yield map is compromised which can have a significant impact on nutrient effectiveness and the cost of inputs," Mr Gladigau said.
"There are also future issues when the creation of quality data, used for future operations, is hampered.
"Yield maps are the obvious one, which are then used to create prescription maps, the understanding of nutrient deficiencies, soil zones and more."
Queensland AgForce grains section president Brendan Taylor said the impact of the outage had been relatively minimal in his area, but added it highlighted potential risks.
"Sowing the winter crop is yet to get into full swing and a lot of sorghum is off so there probably weren't as many people out on tractors as there could be and maybe not doing those precision tasks such as sowing, but it does highlight our reliance on technology," he said.
Mr Gladigau said the couple of days of outages had not been too problematic, but cautioned if the outages went for weeks, rather than days there could be issues.
"There is certainly some talk floating of the outage being part of a larger cyber security threat which would have far greater implications," Mr Gladigau said.
"What would it mean if you had to go all of seeding without GPS or if the industry was held to ransom during seeding or harvest requiring a fee to hackers to unlock our systems to get our crops in effectively?
"The question needs to be asked whether we have a back-up plan if systems fail?"