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NOTES & UNIQUE PHENOMENA

Planting Field-Scale Research Plots with the Aid of GPS-Enabled Assisted Steering

^a Agronomy Dep., Purdue Univ., 915 W. State St., West Lafayette, IN 47907-2054
^b Case-IH, 700 State St., Racine, WI 53404
^c Elburn Cooperative Co., 2915 Wedgewood Dr., Dekalb, IL 60115-4932. Trade names and products are mentioned solely for information. No endorsement by Purdue University is implied

^* Corresponding author (rnielsen{at}purdue.edu).

Field-scale research imposes logistical challenges to planting randomized treatment plots, even for simply designed field experiments. Planter row markers offer minimal assistance when planting randomly located strips of a treatment across a field. Accurately flagging or otherwise marking treatment plots before planting to facilitate accurate planting of the same requires time and labor during a time of the year when both resources are limited. The logistical challenges associated with marking field-scale plots are compounded with fields that are odd-shaped or have undulating topography. We successfully used an eight-row planter plus a tractor equipped with a commercially-available after-market GPS-enabled assisted steering system to facilitate the planting of randomized treatment plots with little to no field marking required before planting. This system simplifies the logistics of planting field-scale research trials and has proven to be acceptably accurate in pass-to-pass accuracies of the "guess rows" between plots.

Abbreviations: DGPS, Differential Global Positioning System • ID, identification • P2P, pass-to-pass

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Received for publication April 9, 2007.