The Solar Storm Fried GPS Systems Used by Some Farmers, Stalling Planting

The powerful geomagnetic storm that cast the northern lights’ vivid colors across the Northern Hemisphere over the weekend also caused some navigational systems in tractors and other farming equipment to break down at the height of planting season, suppliers and farmers said.

Many farmers have come to rely on the equipment, which uses GPS and other navigational technology and helps them to plant more efficiently and precisely by keeping rows straight and avoiding gaps or overlap. But over the weekend, some of those operations in the Midwest, as well as in other parts of the United States and Canada, temporarily ground to a halt.

In Minnesota, some farmers who had planned to spend Friday night sowing seeds were hamstrung by the outages. “I’ve never dealt with anything like this,” said Patrick O’Connor, the owner of a farm about 80 miles south of Minneapolis that mainly grows corn and soybean.

Mr. O’Connor said that after being rained out for two weeks, he got into his tractor around 5 p.m., hoping to spend the night planting corn. When he received a warning about his GPS system, he called a technical help line and was directed to a message saying there was an outage and nothing could be done to fix it.

In Nebraska, another farmer told 404 Media an online publication covering technology, that his operations had been shut down. “All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now shut down because of the solar storm,” said the farmer, Kevin Kenney. “No GPS,” he added. “We’re right in the middle of corn planting.”

Solar storms are caused by violent expulsions of charged particles from the sun’s surface. When directed toward Earth the material can interact with our planet’s magnetic field, resulting in a geomagnetic storm. The event this weekend was the strongest solar storm to reach Earth since October 2003.