I got a job for a 6 acre winery that requires me to lay out every plant, they are in columns 10' apart with a 3' spacing which works out to about 15000 points. So far I have layed out the baseline row (28 columns) and a row every 300' and then I'm stringing a tape in-between stakes and setting popsicles sticks for each plant. Paint marks won't last on the dirt before they plant with the rain we get. ThisThis me is killing my back, bending over 1000s of times a day and it's slow, I'm averaging about 3000 sticks a day. The same client wants us to bid on a 40 acre winery. Can anyone think of a better method or one easier on the back?
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www.flagshooter.com
Interesting project. I can't think of any easier way than pin flags. $100 for a pin flag insertion tool. Roughly $10 for a bundle of 100 pin flags. Not sure what you pay for popsicle sticks.
A spool of something (wire, rope, tubing, or even the actual tapes themselves) layed on the ground or suspended as necessary to enable planting. Marked with paint, flagging or some other method every 3'. As many of these as necessary to accommodate planting. When no longer needed for planting, these pre-marked lengths of wire can then be moved or strung between the end point stakes you preset. So stake your end points then place your pre-marked lines between your end points and rotate as necessary to stay ahead of planting operations. I never have done it and you'll surely have a small learning curve to solve hiccups but the concept should be feasible.
Hire a couple of high school kids - your back will thank you!
A 100 yard tape like this:?ÿ https://www.ustape.com/catalog/sports-yard-tape/sports-yard-tape/
Shoot in a point every hundred yards and tape between them.
Instead of popsicle sticks, bundles of 3'?ÿbamboo used to tie up tomatoes are dirt cheap and would save bending over. Hire a kid to pack the?ÿbundles.
Bada Bing Bada Boom.
I scoured a forestry website for a half hour to see if I could come up with anything for you and came up short, less and except finding this fine video:?ÿ
Which does stand on its own but does not do much to help you.
Field marking chalk or something similar is my bet but I am not sure how to apply it, they make walk behind dispensers for marking lines, maybe you could attach a measuring wheel and pull the trigger every three feet. With such absurd frequency as every three feet you could just chalk the whole line and then knock come back after and kick out a?ÿ notch every three feet.?ÿ
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I scoured a forestry website for a half hour to see if I could come up with anything for you and came up short, less and except finding this fine video:?ÿ
Which does stand on its own but does not do much to help you.
Field marking chalk or something similar is my bet but I am not sure how to apply it, they make walk behind dispensers for marking lines, maybe you could attach a measuring wheel and pull the trigger every three feet. With such absurd frequency as every three feet you could just chalk the whole line and then knock come back after and kick out a?ÿ notch every three feet.?ÿ
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I'm working in freshly tilled dirt prior to planting. Thanks for the effort though.
A spool of something (wire, rope, tubing, or even the actual tapes themselves) layed on the ground or suspended as necessary to enable planting. Marked with paint, flagging or some other method every 3'. As many of these as necessary to accommodate planting. When no longer needed for planting, these pre-marked lengths of wire can then be moved or strung between the end point stakes you preset. So stake your end points then place your pre-marked lines between your end points and rotate as necessary to stay ahead of planting operations. I never have done it and you'll surely have a small learning curve to solve hiccups but the concept should be feasible.
A great idea if I could work with the planters but the client wants it all ready to go and not have to rely on the planters thinking too much
Interesting project. I can't think of any easier way than pin flags. $100 for a pin flag insertion tool. Roughly $10 for a bundle of 100 pin flags. Not sure what you pay for popsicle sticks.
This looks very promising, thank you.
The flagshooter looked pretty good. Looks like you can put flags down as fast as you could walk the line without bending over.
Yeah I was gonna say get you a length of rope that would fit your need and tie some ribbons on it at the required lengths. Of course you would have to have the end points marked so that you could move it to the next line as you complete one.
Definitely hire you some kids.
That Flag Shooter thing is bloody cool and I can see a future need for that. And if you were to get one you could have the kids do the layout. Give them basic instructions, of course you would have to set up the instrument, but teach them how to take a back sight, turn 90 move out the require distance and drive a stake and repeat till they get to the end. Kids are great with grasping the operation of electronics.
Sounds like a cool project.
For that matter let the kids move the line and you use the flag shooter.
I tell ya what that will be next on my BUY List. I like it and I'm thinking maybe get my company logo on it marked with Property Line. This would be great for any kind of line marking need.?ÿ
There is the old proven method of punching a hole with the rod and then packing a few inches of flaggin into the hole.
A spool of something (wire, rope, tubing, or even the actual tapes themselves) layed on the ground or suspended as necessary to enable planting. Marked with paint, flagging or some other method every 3'. As many of these as necessary to accommodate planting. When no longer needed for planting, these pre-marked lengths of wire can then be moved or strung between the end point stakes you preset. So stake your end points then place your pre-marked lines between your end points and rotate as necessary to stay ahead of planting operations. I never have done it and you'll surely have a small learning curve to solve hiccups but the concept should be feasible.
A great idea if I could work with the planters but the client wants it all ready to go and not have to rely on the planters thinking too much
The idea is to have the rope already marked every 3 feet, that way you do need to measure every line every time, just go to the marks and mark it.
Setting the ends and running a rag tape or marked rope is definitely the way to go.?ÿ The flag-shooter type systems look good on paper but unless your placing the flags in rock and debris free soil they are not as slick as the video.?ÿ I used one to layout about 50 miles of tortious fence.
Work with the local dairy farmers, even the Amish are very resourceful in building a planting spacer. A simple axle with several wheel at the proper spacing should work. I mount a GPS on a skid steer every year to make corn mazes. You do the same with a player spacer. Think outside the box. You could mount it on a tractor have it with place flags, whiskers or just dig a hole. Build and they will come.
The flagshooter thing and an assistant looks like the fastest way to go in the immediate future. However, if you are pretty good with tech, I will share a way to do the whole thing automated. This will take some time to set up.
The concept is that you build a remote-controlled vehicle that is controlled by a Pixhawk flight controller. Pixhawk is an autopilot computer that can be used on a ground-based vehicle as well as airborne drones. In this case, a ground-based vehicle is the way to go. Pixhawk will accept an RTK GPS signal giving the vehicle centimeter accuracy. ?ÿThe ground station software that controls the Pixhawk is called Mission Planner. This software is open source and is free. This is what people used before DJI made it simple.
You will need to convert your points into lat and long in decimal format to upload them into Mission Planner. I think there are some size limits on how many waypoints you can load into the Pixhawk. Anyway, in Mission Planner you can control the route the vehicle takes and the accuracy tolerance that is required (how close it needs to get to the waypoint). Think lawnmower path. I even think that is a term the software uses. You will make a mission and upload it from Mission Planner into the Pixhawk flight controller.
So at this point, we have got a remote-controlled vehicle of your choice that is driving to each point stopping at the point for however long you program it to. We need to get it to mark the point. For that ,I think a servo hooked to a utility marking paint dispenser should do the trick. There is a huge amount of functionality built into the Pixhawk to control cameras, and one of the ways they were doing it was with a servo hooked to the Pixhawk outlet pins. You can assign the pins to the servo and treat it like a camera in the program. This way when the vehicle arrives at a waypoint it will stop, hold its position for a few seconds, an activation voltage will engage the servo and that will depress the trigger on the paint marker, and then go to the next point and repeat. I got this very system to work with a camera, and it controlled an IR light instead of a servo, but the option is there in the list. One thing that I did not use was the RTK GPS. I know that it is a headache. ?ÿHere is a video of what I was thinking minus the paint can jerry-rigged setup.
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Not to cut you out of a job, but if I had to plant that many plants in worked ground Id modify a tobacco setter and put it on a tractor with autosteer. With the rows 10' apart it would take a 1 row setter. Theres an opener in the middle that opens up a trench as its pulled theough the field, behind that are 2 wheels on either side of the trench that press the dirt back into it after the plant is in the ground. Theres a seat on either side of the opener facing backwards for 2 people, and a chain driven by the wheels that circles up between the riders. Each rider has a box of whatever they are planting in front of them. The chain has fingers attached to it at the desired spacing that the riders place the plants into, roots toward them. The fingers grab the plant, carry it down to the ground and release it into the trench, and the wheels press the dirt around the roots. For tobacco we always had a barrel of water mounted on the tractor that would gravity flow water to the opener. There was a valve there that opened each time a plant was set that allowed some water to get to the roots. ?ÿ We never had gps so had to use markers that dragged a mark where the next row would be, but a tractor with autosteer would have been the bomb.?ÿ
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Can you go low tech and cheat? Find yourself an industrial size length of twine of the kind used for rabbit tracking or painting a road centerline. Set a couple of rebar in a field 101-301 (+) yards apart and run back and forth, maybe with an atv and the twine spooling off the back, pulling it taut with each pass until you have a few dozen lengths (or more), then lay out a tape alongside?ÿand walk the length of it with a spray paint dispenser so you don't have to bend over, spritzing the bundle of cordage every?ÿyard.?ÿ Cut the bundle on the ends and extract the lengths and coil up.?ÿ?ÿIn the field?ÿset yourself a post or rebar every 100-300 yards (whatever distances will allow for the cordage to stay suspended)?ÿand pull one of these lengths tight between them and tie it off, rinse and repeat.?ÿI could see doing ten acres this way in a day with time left over for a cold refreshment or two.
Decades ago corn farmers planted their seed in what was called a checkrow pattern. ?ÿThis was accomplished by means of checkrow wires that were strung between two rods driven in the ground with the help of a footpeg on one side. ?ÿAs the mechanical corn planter was pulled along the wire, which had "knots" every so many inches (maybe 36 or 42), each knot would trigger the seed plate to drop seeds. ?ÿThe wire and rods would then be offset that same distance (or multiples thereof) over and over until the entire field was planted. ?ÿWeeds and grass could then be cultivated out by driving either with the rows or perpendicular to the rows or at a 45 degree ?ÿangle due to the near perfect alignment of the seed groupings.
https://www.farmcollector.com/implements/check-row-planting-by-the-book
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Google check row planting (planter) to see video demonstrations.
