Canterbury Farmer Builds on 160 Years of Dairy Legacy
Gareth Hale is the current custodian of a 160-year legacy that saw his great grandfather dairying in Taranaki since the mid-1850s and grandfather dairying in the Waikato from the early 1900s.
The journey started in 2001 with the launch of the first StarFire receiver and GreenStar display, which combined to offer visual guidance to help operators steer more precisely and consistently.
Back then, the in-cab display showed an operator they should steer left or right, supporting parallel tracking and improving pass-to-pass precision. This was followed with the launch of AutoTrac in 2022, enabling GPS-assisted automated steering that could keep machines on track, with 30cm accuracy.
By 2004, AutoTrac with RTK honed guidance accuracy to ±2.5cm, making it possible for tractors and combines to follow the same tracks repeatedly over multiple seasons. This offered key advantages for operations such as row-crop production, inter-row hoeing and controlled traffic strategies.
Continually evolving, automated guidance continued to advance beyond steering, with the introduction in 2020 of AutoPath Rows, designed to record the actual driven tracks of each row unit and enable precise repetition. Most recently, in 2024, AutoPath Boundaries has enabled the automatic calculation and creation of optimised paths for the entire field based on its boundaries.
Guidance progress has been matched by equally dramatic change in data recording and connectivity, with real-time data exchange. In the early days, digital field documentation could be as literal as ‘data in the pocket’, with the JD FieldDoc system storing field work on a keycard that had to be read manually in the office.
Today, data transfer is all about automation, with JDLink modems transmitting information in real time to a smartphone, tablet or computer, enabling a connected approach to decision-making and machine management.
In other areas, Data Sync, allows any recently added data regarding field or product details to be automatically synchronised across the entire fleet and John Deere Operations Center, meaning critical information for field work execution is always up to date and accessible to all operators.
Production system marketing manager for Precision Technologies, Peter Koch said: “Over the past 25 years, precision agriculture has moved from early visual guidance and manual data handling to integrated, automated workflows. From keycards to cloud connectivity, and from steering support to highly accurate guidance and automated path creation, the aim has remained the same: to make fieldwork simpler, more precise and more efficient.”
