MENTION GPS guidance in agricultural and horticultural circles and arrow straight furrows and hands-free steering spring to mind.
Large scale horticulturalist Amo Mason, from Werribee South in Victoria, is as enthusiastic as anyone about GPS steering with four tractors sporting AutoFarm receivers, but he's also stepped into a "third dimension": using GPS for two-centimetre precision height control of his land plane.
The result is perfectly graded beds to get excessive rain off quickly along the beds lengthways, and a side fall to ensure water drains away via the end floodway.
"The GPS-formed beds work really well," Amo said. "Good drainage is really important. You can see the water running out and away with no pooling," he said.
Amo grows three crops a year of lettuce, broccoli and fennel on an aggregation of 101ha. Most of the farm is on the Werribee River.
Cropping used to be seasonal but Amo found winter turnover was too low, putting pressure on cash flow.
"We average 40 employees and up to 60 at times. We really need an income all year round."
Another property under development at Balliang, about 40km to the west, will bring the total area up to 140ha.
The business trades as Mason Brothers and was founded by Amo's father almost 50 years ago. It supplies markets throughout Australia. Amo bought his first GPS unit four years ago. "GPS-Ag came down and did a demo.
The results were fantastic and I bought it straight away. We used it only for steering for the first 12 months but I was keen to get into levelling because I wanted to remodel a lot of our blocks. "I went to the US where they do a lot of auto levelling and got to properly understand data logging. It's pretty simple really," Amo added. Auto levelling uses the same processing box and monitor in the cabin but requires a separate receiver dish on the grader.
The signal comes from a tower on Mason Brothers' shed that is also available for community use.
"First we pop a card into the processor and then drive the tractor up and down the paddock every 12m recording heights every second. The card then goes in the computer and the AutoFarm program plots the heights on a grid and displays them as red, green or blue.
"Green is on grade, red is low and blue is high. It's very easy to see where you need to be cutting and dumping. That's followed up with fine tuning to get a constant grade across the block," Amo said.
Precision steering is still the main application for GPS guidance at Mason Brothers. All four tractors are used for 2cm steering accuracy while only two have auto-levelling capability.
The home-made bed former is a work of art. Combinations of discs mounted at acute angles produce perfectly formed beds. There are even small discs on each side to toss soil against the sprinkler lines, and the outer wings fold up hydraulically for transport.
For more details phone GPS-Ag on (03) 5447 1777.
