This is a reminder of how much modern tractors rely on satellite and internet connections. Many farmers can't or won't plant right now bc tractors have been highly automated to increase yield. Rows are planted so tightly together that humans can't navigate them w/o killing crops

One farmer called it a "shitshow." Another: "All the tractors are sitting at the ends of the field right now shut down because of the solar storm." Another said their systems that are normally centimeter-accurate were off by 3-6 feet and tractor kept "wandering off" and had to be constantly corrected.

This, from a John Deere dealer, is wild. They warn that affected tractors operated during this time will likely have made maps that are wrong, which will be wrong throughout the growing system, and which are wrong in an inconsistent way

@jasonkoebler That's insane and just plain very bad. There doesn't even seem to be a 'manual' option to get at least some planting done.

"My coffee machine stopped working because my cloud provider has a DNS problem..."

Face, meet palm...

@paul @jasonkoebler The problem is that the farms in question are set up to require superhuman precision. Get just two inches out of line and you're destroying your crop.