A Southland contractor is calling on an international technology company to give its clients a refund after a satellite failure hampered his GPS-guided tractors.
Dillon Harvesting owner Mark Dillon, of Riversdale, said he was preparing to compete at the New Zealand Ploughing Championships in Milton on April 17 when his staff called him about a signal failure in the satellite they used to guide five of the GPS-enabled tractors in his fleet.
At the time of the outage, some of the tractors were being used to plant seed for winter barley and wheat.
There had been shorter outages before but there was usually a work-around available.
This time, there was no easy fix.
"It was a big picture thing — it’s frustrating."
The GPS tracking allowed the tractors to be guided accurately, enabling seed-planting equipment to sow crops with precision to increase efficiency and reduce wastage.
"You spend a lot of money equipping these tractors with autosteer and you rely on it and then can’t use it and we lose our efficiency."
He estimated a loss in efficiency of up to 15% .
"Maybe more".
For the technology, he paid an annual subscription of $2500 a tractor to JJ Ltd.
"I bet they’ll still want their money; it’ll be interesting to see if we get any discounts."
He doubted he would get a refund.
"They’ll have some loophole, but we’ll ask the question."
A spokesman for JJ Ltd said the outage hit many tractor operators in the South, across many tractor brands running a GPS-system built by United States technology company Trimble.
The service returned in New Zealand on the morning of Wednesday April 19.
JJ Ltd was a third-party seller of the services from Trimble.
Southern Rural Life contacted Trimble for comment about the call for a refund, but it did not respond before deadline.
Despite the frustration of the system outage, Mr Dillon went on to win the conventional silver plough class at the championships.
He and Bob Mehrtens, of Timaru, will represent New Zealand at the World Ploughing Championships in Estonia next year.
