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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it is fairly simple.
Pick a target point far away.
plow toward that target.
with the advent of tractors, go for /u/EaddyAcres comment.
Everyone is mentioning eyeballing the first pass but no one has mentioned that old tractors had a little hood ornament way out on the tip of the nose. The ones i am most familiar with are internationals from the 70s and 80s, and they had a small black piece shapes like a stretched out pyramid.
You line that up with a spot in the horizon, like a tree on the far edge of your field and keep it there. Many farmers also grew up working the same fields year after year and just kind of got the hang of it.
Small tractors and small farms today still use this method, you wont find gps until you get into really large plots of land. The massive operations out west absoluetly use gps and self steering machines.
Corn mazes are also plotted on gps, although i am not sure how they plant them.
Go watch “Clarkson’s Farm” on Prime and see how its supposed to be done, and how it’s possible to cock it up.
When you drive a tractor every day for 40years it’s easy to make straight lines as they are the most efficient way to plant
However new tech is coming every day ~2012 our family farm started with GPS tech it started with a light bar, telling you if your heading (degrees from north) was correct. Then we got proper GPS but it still required you to steer manually.
Then we got auto steer, this is a small motor that used a foam wheel to turn your steering wheel. Since most tractors use hydrostatic steering (using hydraulic cylinders to turn the wheels) most modern auto steering systems use a steering box that can turn the wheels itself. This system can keep us accurate up to 6inches
New systems keep track of almost every metric you can think of and make farming operations incredibly efficient. Most of the time the operator only needs to be there to turn around and ensure everything is operating properly. You select your field and the system already has your lines set up so you just select one, hit the button and go. This frees up operator time to monitor the other parts of the machine and fine tune calibrations
Unlike a car when you are planting you have a long distance between the hitch and the wheels of your implement and that helps take out any small variance along with skill from spending often up to 16hr days on a family farm in the tractor
Is it not odd that no one has mentioned following the dead furrow after the original straight line? Must be a Midwest thing.
We use gps guidance, but without that, it’s really not that hard. Think about how you stay in a car lane. You stay within your lines, but you might go back and forth between the two. It averages out to being straight, but there’s definitely going to be some side to side in there
We have a newer tractor and it has precision gps. No more tram lines. It hooks into newer equipment and provides geographic data on crops as you pass. Nothing beats pulling up a heat map of how the harvest went, yields per specific square meter.
When I was growing up on our farm you had distant markets you would line up and go off of while keeping the tractor centered over the row you harvested. It’s pretty much all automated now using GPS and in ground sensors on the new tractors and combines.
Dads a farmer. I’ve helped him on the farm.
Essentially you use “gps” to open a map program and the. You drive against your levee to make your first line. The program then makes a line and you set distance apart. You just have to turn at end.
There’s a knob that you put on steering wheel that has a motor that spins the wheel to keep it straight.
Gps or Row marker.
A row marker is basically a metal bar on the side of the tractor thats parallel to the ground that has perpendicular bar thats long enough to drag on the ground, effectively “marking” the next row.
It’s a rudimentary method but very efficient.
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