GPS for drilling and planting: an honest answer
Short answer
On its own, a phone is not accurate enough to guide drilling or planting. Even a dual-frequency iPhone is typically 0.5–0.7 m off and sometimes nearly 2 m, and matching a 3–6 m drill bout needs accuracy measured in centimetres. Use markers, tramlines or RTK guidance for the drilling itself; Tractor GPS – Field Guidance can still map and log the job.
Updated · Oran Dynamics
Why drilling is different
With a sprayer or spreader, a metre of error is a small share of a 24 m pass, and the spread pattern overlaps anyway. With a 4 m drill, a metre is a quarter of a pass. Gaps and doubled rows show in the crop all season, and in row crops they affect every operation after.
What the app is still good for when drilling
- A record of what's drilled: area, time and a coverage map per field, useful when several fields or several days are involved.
- Area for seed ordering: measure each field once and keep the area.
- Planning: the job planner estimates fills and time from the area, rate and hopper size.
What to use for the drilling itself
- Drill markers or tramline marking on the drill.
- RTK guidance: an RTK receiver with a correction service, usually with autosteer. See the phone vs light bar vs autosteer vs RTK guide for typical costs.
- An external receiver paired in iOS improves on the phone's own GPS. How much depends entirely on the receiver: read accuracy before relying on it for drilling.
Questions
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Not for matching rows on the phone's own GPS, which is accurate to a metre or two at best. It can map and log the planting job.
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Matching bouts needs a few centimetres, which in practice means RTK.
Try Tractor GPS on your iPhone
A–B guidance, live coverage mapping and field boundaries — using the phone you already own.
Download the appRelated
- Measure field acres on your iPhone Measure a field's area in acres or hectares on your iPhone: draw the boundary on the satellite map, or drive the field once and save it. Area and perimeter, saved per field.
- GPS app for spraying fields Use your iPhone as sprayer guidance: straight lines at boom width, a live map of what you've sprayed, tank fills planned per job. What it does well, and where phone accuracy runs out.
- GPS for fertiliser spreading Use an iPhone as GPS guidance for fertiliser (fertilizer) spreading: lines at your bout width, a live map of what you've spread, and fills planned per job. Honest about accuracy.
- GPS for slurry spreading Use an iPhone to map slurry spreading: see exactly where the last load ran out, keep passes at bar width with a dribble bar or trailing shoe, and log area per job.