Our sun has been spewing out a ton of charged plasma and particles for a while now. If you’ve been in areas where the aurora borealis is visible, that’s probably why you’ve been seeing more of it lately.
This trend will reprtedly continue through 2025 and even into 2026. It’s all a part of the sun’s natural 11-year cycle between low and high activity. While some people have enjoyed the beautiful shimmering displays of the aurora borealis because of it, farmers who rely on GPS systems to navigate their machines through crop fields are seeing their highly advanced agricultural tech go apeshit.
Imagine a tractor on a farm and you probably envision a guy in overalls and a straw hat steering a machine that looks like it’s more rust than metal. Modern tractors are highly advanced, extraordinarily expensive pieces of equipment that depend on GPS tracking for making precise movements. When a solar storm releases a ton of charged particles into the ionosphere, the GPS signals modern farming equipment rely on get thrown out of whack. Some of the machines will stop dead in their tracks, some will start weaving uncontrollably through fields.
Speaking with SpaceWeather.com, a John Deere service manager named Ethan Smidt said he estimates that around 80 percent or more of all farmers in the Midwest use some form of GPS for something, and that at least 50 percent of all farmers across the United States are – as he put it – “VERY” reliant on GPS for their machines.
One farmer, Elaine Ramstad, who spoke to Spaceweather.com, said, “Our tractors acted like they were demon possessed.” Ramstad is also an aurora chaser, meaning she travels around her home state of Minnesota looking for the best spots to catch a glimpse of the aurora borealis when solar flare activity is particularly high. When activity was high on May 10, 2024, she said she got a call from her cousins telling her that the auroras she loves so much were “driving them crazy while they were planting.”
So increased solar activity has clearly been driving farmers nuts for a while now, and it seems like it’s going to continue for a fair while longer.
The post Solar Storms Are Sending Tractors Haywire appeared first on VICE.
The post Solar Storms Are Sending Tractors Haywire appeared first on VICE.
