The powerful geomagnetic storm that cast the vivid colors of the aurora borealis across the northern hemisphere over the weekend also damaged some navigation systems on tractors and other farm equipment at the height of the planting season, suppliers and farmers said.
Many farmers have come to rely on the equipment, which uses GPS and other navigation technology to help them plant more efficiently and accurately, keeping rows straight and avoiding gaps or overlaps. But over the weekend, some of those businesses in the Midwest, as well as other parts of the United States and Canadatemporarily to stop.
In Minnesota, some farmers who had planned to spend Friday night sowing seeds were interrupted by the holiday. “I’ve never dealt with anything like this,” said Patrick O’Connor, who owns a farm about 80 miles south of Minneapolis that grows mostly corn and soybeans.
Mr O’Connor said after two weeks of rain, he got into his tractor around 5pm, hoping to spend the night planting corn. When he received a warning about his GPS system, he called a technical helpline and was directed to a message saying there was an outage and nothing could be done to fix it.
In Nebraska, another farmer he told 404 Media, an online publication covering technology, that its operations had been shut down. “All the tractors are sitting on the edge of the field right now shut down because of the solar storm,” said farmer, Kevin Kenney. “No GPS,” he added. “We’re right in the middle of planting corn.”
Solar storms are caused by violent ejections of charged particles from the sun’s surface. When the material heads toward Earth it can interact with our planet’s magnetic field, resulting in a geomagnetic storm. This weekend’s event was the strongest solar storm to reach Earth since October 2003.
Farm equipment suppliers had warned that the storm would lead to a holiday. And on Saturday, Landmark Implement, which sells John Deere farm equipment in parts of the Midwest, said the accuracy of some of its systems had been “extremely compromised” by the incident.
the company said in a statement that he was looking for a “tool to help predict this in the future so we can try to alert our customers that this issue might arise.” He described the storm as a “historic event” and not something he should “continue to battle often.”
Terry Griffin, an associate professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University, said that although rare, such storms still pose a threat to agriculture in the United States, where the majority of crops are planted with modern guidance systems.
“This was the first time we had geomagnetic storms this strong and we were relying on GPS,” he said, noting that among the worst times for such a storm was during the planting season, when accuracy is critical. Alternative technologies, including systems using machine vision and artificial intelligence, or a more localized navigation system that wouldn’t crash in a solar storm, are being developed, Dr Griffin added.
Mr O’Connor, the Minnesota farmer, said the outage made him realize how dependent he had been on a technology that is often taken for granted, and that if it stopped working again in the future and for a longer period of time, he might have to “they find ways to get by without.”
On Friday night, instead of planting corn, Mr O’Connor said he prepared a different field for planting while taking in the “phenomenal” colors of the sky. “My night was interrupted, but I was still in the field,” he added.
“I could see the Northern Lights in all their glory.”