How Ordnance Survey Helps Farmers
Organic farming is using satellite and spatial technology to generate better yields, save money and maintain hedgerows
New pPhoto by William Topa on Unsplash
On any given day in the United Kingdom
Ordnance Survey will tell you that there will be something like 20,000 changes every day in the built and natural environment across the British Isles. Flying from the Scilly Isles to the Shetland Isles for 9 months in every year the OS Flying Team record around 2 gigabytes per second over a normal six hour day. Within 3 years all of Great Britain's natural and built environment is completely refreshed. The detail finds its way into every OS map.
What it means for British farmers
Beginning in 2014 and every year since over 373,919km (232,342 miles) of England’s farmland hedges have been accurately mapped by a new digital dataset, the OS 'Landscape Features Layer'. The Rural Protection Agency commissioned Ordnance Survey to manage the identification and mapping of hedgerows as part of its Countryside Stewardship Scheme.
In recent times the common hedgerow has risen in significance due to its capacity to protect against soil erosion and pollution, by water supply management and flood control. We should be amazed at how well a hedgerow manages to do all of this while still being both home and larder to a rich collection of insects, birds and mammals.
The Soil Association working with the farming community, are able to advise the farmer how to better manage their hedgerows as an important component in improving crop yields. In January 2023 the Government announced it will speed up Sustainable Farming Incentive roll-out with new sets of paid actions to support food production and environmentally responsible farming.
British tractors can work to accuracies of 1.5cm in any field
CNH Industrial manufacture tractors for customers all over the world, every one with customer specific preferences, but all UK tractors have one thing in common OS NET from Ordnance Survey a hyper accurate network of positioning base stations.
A farm customer says "Having machines operating at 100% efficiency to an accuracy as tiny as 1.5cm means we eliminate overlaps, plus the high repeatability means we can link tractors together so that if one is following the other the precision means the wheel tracks are in exactly the same place.
Depending on the system, reports CNH Industrial, we could be saving between 5 and 10% on fertiliser and seed used in the field.
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A little over 70 years ago farms were managed by hand, organic by nature. From 1946 we began to industrialise farming methods and in the process without realising the damage being done we turned nature on its head. Now we do understand and we are acting to recover vital land and hedgerows.
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