Farmers back in the field after geomagnetic storm

LE MARS, Iowa (KCAU) — After a rainy April, conditions over the weekend were perfect for farmers to get out and plant. However, many of them encountered issues with their GPS system.

“When the GPS went down, we first sat in the end of the field for about an hour and a half trying to figure out what was wrong and talking to the ARTK company that we get our correction signal from,” Plymouth County crop farmer Andy Schroeder said. “And at that time, we didn’t know anything about the solar flares.”

After the geomagnetic storms swept through the Siouxland area, many farmers had to call it a day.

“GPS, it’s been something that changed farming, honestly,” Aric Den Herder with the Farmers Cooperative Society said. “We use it for planting, we use it for spraying, we use it for putting on fertilizer or anything. And if that goes out, then we might get misapplications. We’re going to plant in some curvy rows and it’s not going to be fun once you get the combine out in the fall.”

“The biggest problem, I think, is for spraying,” Schroeder said. “If you’re going across here and you lose your guidance, like most of our sprayers aren’t equipped with foamers anymore to mark where we’ve already sprayed and it’s been years since we even use foams, so we probably won’t even have foam capabilities on our sprayers anymore.”

Despite many farmers’ global positioning systems being down, Schroeder decided that wouldn’t stop him on Friday.

“You know, since we lost the guidance, we had to go back to planting with markers and we did not auto-row shut off, so we had to manually operate the planter and every aspect,” he said.

Schroeder planted most of his corn in April, but he still has more planting to do. He said both the solar storm and the rain are a bump in the road.

“The beans being a lot more challenging,” Schroeder said. “We’re having wet spots so you have to plant around and, you know, leave and maybe come back in a few weeks, try to refill in.”

Planting for both corn and soybeans are behind their average schedules, but there’s still time to get those crops in the ground.

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