MachineryLink

A stylebook for magazines like DTN/The Progressive Farmer is a verbal bible. It tells us how and why to use particular technical words, phrases and abbreviations. It gives us consistency and maintains quality. Here's an example to illustrate: "BEEF GRADES: capitalized -- Prime, Choice, Select, Standard, Commercial, Utility, Cutter, Canner"

But unlike The Bible, the stylebook gets quickly outdated, especially about machinery and technology.

It's been a while -- maybe 10 years -- since we at DTN/The Progressive Farmer have undertaken the chore of bringing our stylebook up to date, in part, because it's darned tedious work. Another reason is that time flies in our business. Change sneaks up on you. Terminology in our stylebook that was appropriate yesterday is now antiquated. Conversely, phrases that are used every day by us and our readers haven't yet made their way into the stylebook.

We're in the midst of the updating process now, and I have been struck by how much our current stylebook lacks. We have no mention of GPS (global positioning system), for instance, or utility vehicles. At first, these omissions were mysterious to me. How could we be so far behind the times?

Rather than blame our own procrastination, let me blame the rapid pace of technological change.

After all, although the guidance technology itself has been in existence for more than 40 years, it wasn't until 2000 that private companies like Trimble began exploring the possibilities of using GPS technology for agricultural practices. And I didn't write my first story about autosteer until about 2002, a mere 11 years ago.

Our current stylebook also does not reference RTK. I remember having to spell out its meaning for readers because it was such an unfamiliar term: Real Time Kinematic. In 2005, only eight years ago, I wrote that the cost of an autosteer system with RTK was around $50,000. Today's cost is a fraction of that; as technology gets older, it gets cheaper.

In a short amount of time, we have seen RTK move from portable base stations, to base stations positioned on silos, to towers dealers erected to give their customers and potential customers a way to use the technology. Now we have transitioned to cell phone-based RTK systems, which do double duty by allowing the next big thing: telematics.

It was only three years ago that John Deere, for example, introduced a telematics system named JDLink. At the time, the word "telematics" was experimental and maybe a little controversial. (Instead, I wanted to call the technology "telemetry." I remembered that term from my childhood when America actually had a manned space program and NASA used telemetry to wirelessly keep track of astronauts' heartbeats, pulse rates and blood pressure.) Eventually, "telematics" became the accepted terminology for agricultural applications.

I guess the point is: Technologies in agriculture change rapidly and language has to change with them. We like to think our stylebook is only temporarily out of date. But the truth is that by the time we update it later this month, it undoubtedly will be outdated again.

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