Globally Positioned Success

Production Is Blooming at Highlands County Caladium Farm With the Use of Global Positioned System

- PAUL CATALA

UNTIL THE EARLY 1980s and the advent of the Global Positioning System (GPS), plant and crop growers would have to manually measure offa fence line or get a surveyor to set straight lines and drive stakes to keep plant rows straight.

The task was tedious, with tractors pulling marker bars next to beds, driving back and forth and following lines manually made in the dirt.

But with GPS now being used in everything from ocean liners to cell phones, it was only natural that technology made its way into agricultural uses.

Over the past decade, Avon Park’s Classic Caladiums, Inc., has made use of GPS in its tractors and has seen marked improvement in productivity and optimizing use of field labor.

Sometimes called “precision agriculture,” along with Geographic Information Systems technology, GPS has been made farming more site-specific. In turn, real-time data combined with accurate position statistics allows farms to have more efficient use and analysis of geospatial data.

The current Classic Caladiums site officially opened in 2002 in a former cow pasture off W. State Road 64. It contains 850 acres, of which about 450 acres are farmable and 240 in production. A contract caladium grower also farms another 100 acres.

Gary Henderson, Classic Caladiums farm manager who has been with the company for 20 years, said prior to the invention of GPS, caladium and other farming such as tomatoes and strawberries was “strenuous, tedious and you really had to be on your A game to do it the old way.”