The powerful geomagnetic storm that cast the vivid colors of the northern lights across the northern hemisphere over the weekend also caused some navigation systems on tractors and other farm equipment to break down at the height of the planting season, suppliers and farmers.
Many farmers have come to rely on the equipment, which uses GPS and other navigation technologies and helps them plant more efficiently and accurately by keeping rows straight and avoiding gaps or overlaps. But over the weekend, some of those operations in the Midwest, as well as elsewhere in the United States and Canada, were temporarily halted.
In Minnesota, some farmers who had planned to spend Friday night sowing seeds were paralyzed by outages. “I’ve never dealt with anything like this,” said Patrick O’Connor, who owns a farm about 80 miles south of Minneapolis that primarily grows corn and soybeans.
Mr O’Connor said that after two weeks of rain, he got on his tractor around 5pm, hoping to spend the night planting corn. When he received a warning about his GPS system, he called a technical help line and received a message saying there was an outage and nothing could be done to fix it.
In Nebraska, another farmer told 404 Media, an online publication that covers technology, that his operations had been shut down. “All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now, shut off 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 surface of the sun. When headed toward Earth, the material can interact with our planet’s magnetic field, resulting in a geomagnetic storm. This weekend’s event was the strongest solar storm to hit Earth since October 2003.
Farm equipment suppliers had warned that the storm would cause disruption. 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” because of the event.
The company said in a statement that it was looking for a “tool to help predict this in the future so we can try to alert our customers that this issue may be arising.” He described the storm as a “historic event” rather than something he would have to “continue to battle frequently.”
Terry Griffin, associate professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University, said that although they are rare, these types of storms still pose a threat to agriculture in the United States, where most crops are planted using modern guidance systems. .
“This was the first time we had such strong geomagnetic storms and we were relying on GPS,” he said, noting that one of the worst times for a storm like this to occur was during planting season, when accuracy is crucial. Alternative technologies are being developed, including systems that use computer vision and artificial intelligence, or a more localized navigation system that would not collapse in a solar storm, Dr. Griffin added.
Mr. O’Connor, the Minnesota farmer, said the blackout had made him realize how dependent he was on a technology that is often taken for granted, and that if it stopped working again in the future, and by a longer period, he might have to “find ways to get by without it.”
On Friday night, instead of planting corn, O’Connor said he prepared a different field for planting, while looking at the “phenomenal” colors of the sky. “It interrupted my evening, but I was still in the field,” he added.
“I was able to see the northern lights in all their splendor.”