How do farmers also have their fields plowed so straight for so far? Do they use GPS guidance somehow? And if they use some sort of tech, were they able to plow fields this straight back in the day?
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Geometry tells us that any two points can be connected by a straight line. One way to mark this on a piece of lans is to put stakes into the ground where you want the ends of the row to be, then tie string to the stakes and stretch it tight. The string will form a straight line, which you can use to guide your plow.
Depends on the size of the farm. My rows are only 100 ft long so I pretty well eyeball the first pass then keep my tires on one side of the tractor just inside the tilled earth. Tractors on the next size up in scale have locks on the steering wheel and they basically eyeball it like I do. Now when you get into the huge monoculture farmers that do 1000s and 1000s of acres, thats where you’ll see really big tractors that utilize gps to stay straight. With each increase in size the tractors are significantly faster moving too. Im moving at a crawl on my little tractor when I break up 5ft wide swaths, the big gps tractors will break 20+ft wide swaths of ground at over 10mph .
If you just can follow the edge of the field you can just set up two poles and drive so they line up. After that, you can just follow your previous track
GPS and even local argumentation systems are used today but that is not required to just drive in a straight line
Back in the day they pretty much eyeballed it. They look forward, choose some marker, and drive straight at it. After thousands of hours of practice, they get very good at going very straight.
No one here is giving you an answer on how they do it today. Almost all newer tractors are self driving and use 16-25 satellites to mark GPS coordinates and can plant and plow to within 2 inches of accuracy.
This is 2023. We have technology.
Nowadays, yes, farmers use GPS or other positioning tech to keep rows straight.
My uncle used to farm before GPS technology, and he once showed me how he did it. He would do the edge of the field first. He would positon his tractor carefully in the corner of each field and point his tractor at a landmark on the other side. He had a big Cadillac hood ornament that he would use as a site. He would do the edge rows very slowly and carefully, stopping every few dozen yards to make sure he was straight. As he was doing this, the tractor had an extended arm that would cut a line in the dirt about 10 yards to the side of the tractor. When he finished the end row, he would turn around, line up his hood ornament with the marker line, and go to town for the rest of the field.
Modern tractors have gps equipped and can literally drive itself around a field [info](https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2017/ee_1.html)
It’s a skill, and has been since walking behind oxen with a wooden plough.
Ploughing matches developed in the late 18th century when swing ploughs were first used on a wide scale. They had long mouldboards to cut neat and straight furrows. This helped to generate pride in the work of the ploughman. Of course, this pride became competitive. Ploughing matches were a good way to improve skills and technology. Producing a good furrow was the height of skill. If the furrow was too ‘open’ the seed would get buried and would not germinate.
There is a global [organisation](https://worldploughing.org/)
So we are the last of a dying breed. We have mining/construction company and we’re a small to midsized cash crop farm. Our tractors and construction equipment have the capability to have integrated GPS but we still go by “feel” on our dozers. Our planters are done by eye then once we get the rows established the planter has mechanical arms that swing down and cut a marker line in the field that corresponds to half the width of the planter. The we turn around and follow the marker line rinse and repeat.
We’ve moved on from just GPS signal to drive straight. Lots of farmers use RTK networks which use towers or base stations instead of only satellites. RTK networks can have centimeter level accuracy due to not having to rely on satellites. In the tractor, you quite literally push a button and it drives straight. Some have the functions to turn themselves also
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