Auto steer records every pass a tractor makes, to the centimetre, with the time, and I use the map to bill the job. Every night in April the map shows a pass down the long field, and the tractor is in the shed with the key in the house and the engine hours unchanged.
I am an agricultural contractor and I do drilling and spraying for about thirty farms.
What the guidance logs.
The tractor has a receiver on the roof and a screen in the cab. When you engage auto steer it drives the line for you, and it records the pass: the machine, the implement, the width, the time, the position every second, and the engine hours. At the end of the job you have a coverage map, and the map is the invoice, because the farmer pays by the hectare done.
The log is in the terminal and it is also sent up to an account online, so it survives the terminal being replaced.
Every night from about the start of April to the middle of May the log shows a pass across the long field at one farm, from the gate end to the far hedge and back, at about half past two in the morning.
Machine: my drill tractor. Implement: the drill. Speed: about ten kilometres an hour, which is drilling speed.
The tractor is in my shed eleven miles away, locked, with the key on a hook in the house, and its engine hours in the morning are the hours it had at night.
I know about the engine hours because that was the first thing I checked, and I have checked them every morning through April for four years now.
What has been checked.
The receiver. Replaced with the terminal in 2022 when the manufacturer changed the system. The passes carried on, in the new account, from the new terminal.
The account. Only I can log in and the login history shows me, in the day, on the days I worked.
Another machine. A contractor with a similar tractor could in principle work that field and if his log somehow landed in my account it would look like this. There is no other contractor with a drill on that farm and the farmer would know. And the pass is not a stranger's guess at a pass: it follows my AB line, the one I set on the first day I ever drilled that field, to the centimetre, including the dog leg round the wet patch that I put in by hand in 2019.
The field.
I drill it in April. It is a long thin field with a hedge at the far end and a gate at the near one, and I have a pass across it every night through the drilling window whether I drilled that day or not.
In 2023 I did not drill it at all, because the farmer put it into a scheme and left it fallow.
The pass ran every night through April at half past two, drilling speed, drill attached, on a field with nothing sown in it, and in the log the drill's seed rate channel, which is the flow of seed through the metering unit, reads a rate, the rate I use for spring barley on that farm.
What the field looked like.
I went and stood in it in May 2023. Fallow, green with whatever had come up, and no tramlines, no wheelings, nothing.
Except that in the two metres along the AB line where the dog leg goes round the wet patch, the grass was shorter, and the ground was firmer under my boot, the way a headland is where it has been driven on, and the wet patch was not wet.
What is done about it.
I take it out of the invoices, obviously. The passes are flagged on the map as unbilled and the farmer has never seen them and has no reason to.
The manufacturer looked at the account in 2022 and said the logs were consistent with the machine being operated and that if I believed the machine had been used without my knowledge I should contact the police. I explained the engine hours. They said they could not comment on the engine hours.
What I do.
I drill in the day and I check the hours in the morning.
The one change is that I do not leave the drill on the tractor overnight in April.
It takes twenty minutes to hitch a drill and I used to leave it on through the drilling window because twenty minutes a morning for six weeks is a lot of mornings.
I take it off now, every night, and the log through April still shows the pass, with the drill attached and the seed rate flowing, on a tractor with no drill on it.
The reason for taking it off is not the log. It is that in April 2022 I went out to the shed at half past two, once, because I had decided I would, and the tractor was where I had left it, and the key was in the house, and the drill was on the back, and when I put my hand on the drill's hopper it was cold, and when I put my hand on the metering unit underneath, which is a little wheel that turns to meter the seed, it was turning.