Real-Time Kinematic guidance is not new. The technology has been around in agriculture for over a decade. What has changed is that the cost of running RTK across an entire fleet, rather than just on a flagship piece of kit, has come down enough that it is realistic for a contracting business our size to make it the standard rather than the exception.
That is the position we are in now: every operation we run, from primary cultivation through to crop spraying, is RTK-guided. Not as an upsell, not on selected equipment, but as the default. Here is what that actually means on each pass.
On a cultivator
The first job of any RTK system is to keep the equipment in the right place across passes. On a cultivator that means no missed strips between passes, and no wasted overlap. On a typical field, the overlap on a non-guided system might be 5 to 10% of the working width. Over a whole field, over a whole season, that adds up to a measurable amount of fuel, time and soil disturbance that does not need to happen.
On a drill
This is where RTK earns its keep most visibly. Drilling with guidance means rows are straight, evenly spaced, and predictable. Predictable matters because every operation that follows, from spraying to harvest, can come back to those rows with confidence. If the drill is wandering, every subsequent pass has to either ignore the rows or fight them. With RTK, the sprayer in May knows exactly where the drill went in October.
We use this particularly on our 4.8m Weaving GD trailed drill and on the Weaving Sabre Tine. Both are well-specified pieces of kit; both work better with accurate guidance behind them.
“The sprayer in May knows exactly where the drill went in October.” Why predictable rows compound across a season
On a slurry tanker
Slurry is a high-cost, high-impact input. Every gallon of slurry has a value, both as a nutrient and as something we are trying to manage carefully on the land. RTK guidance on the tanker means the application pattern is consistent, the overlap is minimal, and the field gets what it was supposed to get rather than a patchwork.
When the tanker has flowmeter and ISOBUS control on top of RTK (which ours does), the application rate is also constant across the field, regardless of forward speed. So the guidance puts the boom in the right place and the electronics put the right amount through it. Together that is a slurry pass that is genuinely doing what was planned.
On a sprayer
Crop spraying is the operation where bad guidance causes the most visible problems: stripes in the canopy, gaps in coverage, double-dosed strips where boom overlap was excessive. RTK takes that off the table. The Amazone UX3200 we use runs at 24m, and at that width, even small errors in guidance show up as significant variation in coverage. With RTK, the variation goes away.
On hedgecutting and field mapping
Less obvious, but still relevant. RTK lets us run repeatable passes for hedgecutting, particularly on a long boundary where the operator’s eye starts to drift over a long day. For field mapping, RTK is the basis of the whole job: we use a UTV with RTK to map fields for guidance and area sizing, and the accuracy of that map is what makes the resulting work possible.
The point
RTK does not make a contractor good. A poor operator with RTK is still a poor operator. What it does is take a competent operator and let them produce consistently better work, with less waste, across a longer working day, on equipment that knows where it is on the ground.
For us, it is the standard. It is part of what you are buying when you book a job with our contracting team.
Fourth-generation farmer at Spains Hall, Willingale. Runs the contracting team and writes most of what appears here.