Miller's Favorite Story of 2024

Editor's Note:

As the year comes to a close, we've once again asked the DTN/Progressive Farmer reporting team to pick out the most significant, most fun, or otherwise their favorite, story of 2024. They range from solar events to seeing how seed corn is produced, political/policy coverage to wildfire impact, to including profiles of American farmers and ranchers who shared their marketing, production and even life choices with our writers. We hope you enjoy our writers' favorites, continuing the series with today's story by DTN Senior Machinery Editor Dan Miller.

**

The historic GPS-battering geomagnetic storms that interrupted planting last May may stage a return in 2025. Like a springtime thunderstorm, they were awesome in their might, light and solar materials firing out from mighty disruptions on the sun that could hit the earth within minutes or days.

But solar storms are not seasonal. They are much less predictable than even your average weather forecast. They may not happen for years, or one could happen now. The storm of May did hit hard, taking down positioning receivers for minutes to hours.

And that was the thing -- how often does space and a corn planter collide -- that these arrivals from space could and did have an impact on planting in the United States and Canada smack in the middle of harvest?

"The probability that this happens during planting is low," said Terry Griffin, precision agriculture economist at Kansas State University. "But hey, on Friday (May 10), it happened. My advice is don't panic. Go get an early lunch. But if we're going to have a spring of every other day (solar events) and four-hour delays each time, that gets serious."

We did have many events during the weeks that followed. But none like the storm of May.

Rebecca L. Bishop, research scientist in the Space Science and Applications Laboratory at The Aerospace Corporation, detailed for us the effects of large solar storms.

"It really depends on the data collection system," she told DTN/Progressive Farmer. "If the data is geolocated using GPS locally, there were two ways it could have been affected. A complete loss of signal lock by the GPS receiver due to extreme noise from the upper atmosphere (primarily nighttime) could have resulted in no location data for an interval of time. Noise introduced by the upper atmosphere (also) could have induced errors in the calculated position."

The story that followed was an interesting one. Half about the sun and solar eruptions. Half about farmers working below them.

Here's the full story with places to go for solar storm warnings and ideas to minimize their impact on everyday farming: "Farmers Can't Stop Solar Storms, But They Can Manage Their Effects on Ag Equipment," https://www.dtnpf.com/…

Dan Miller can be reached at dan.miller@dtn.com

Follow him on social platform X @DMillerPF

(c) Copyright 2024 DTN, LLC. All rights reserved.