Precision RTK Tree Planting

Weve been out in Suffolk with long term RTKF Net Customer Andy Rusling planting Christmas Trees on behalf of Park View Nurseries. The requirement for this project was to drill holes, for the trees, exactly 75cm apart in order to accommodate trickle tape irrigation. The holes would be drilled 3 at a time in a triangular formation with each pass stepped so the 75cm requirement is met in each direction. This maximises the number of trees in the field while ensuring the most efficient use of irrigation and nutrients.

To achieve this precision Andy used a GEBR. EZENDAM PGB05 Automatic Plant Hole drilling machine manufactured in the Netherlands. The PGB05 has drills mounted on a moving sled so that the tractor can maintain a constant speed. The activation of the drills and the sled can be controlled purely by time or by a land wheel, however this was not providing the required accuracy causing the distance between holes to vary either being too wide or too close. Andy got in touch with us to see if RTK could be used to increase the accuracy as the Control box for the PGB05 had an option for an external GPS feed.

The external GPS function on the PGB05 required a 5v electronic signal to be sent to activate the drill. On Andys T8 New Holland he uses the Intelliview 4 screen with an RTK enabled Trimble AG372 receiver on our Ntrip network for autosteer. While this system is capable of implement control via Isobus it does not have the ability to output the required 5v signal. In addition to this the PGB05 is used on other tractors around the country and so a universal solution was required regardless of what tractor was being used. To deal with this we installed an FMX screen, unlocked to RTK, and mounted the GPS antenna on the drill itself. The FMX has tree planting software as standard which allows for the 5v signal to be output at specific distance intervals. This also meant that the setup could be transferred with the drill from tractor to tractor regardless of how they were setup for GPS.

Once the required distance interval was setup in the FMX screen, we then needed to calibrate the latency of the signal. This is to fine tune the amount of time required from the signal being sent by the FMX to the Drill being activated. This is obviously a very small time frame but a few milliseconds can make a big difference to the distance between the holes over the length of the field.

All in this setup took around 3 hours to get perfect but the time saved over the course of the next few days in getting the job done was huge. GPS and Precision Ag processes can be complex and time consuming to setup but the time savings that come from these technologies always far outweighs this.