GPS Fleet Tracking for Agriculture & Farm Fleets

The difference between a farm fleet and any other is that half of it never sees pavement. The Geotab GO device on the grain trucks and pickups reports the same position and engine data it would in any fleet. On tractors, combines and self-propelled sprayers, High Point GPS installs the GO device with a harness suited to the machine, so the same map shows the combine in the field, the grain cart beside it and the truck on the road to the elevator. Trailers, augers, seed tenders and anhydrous tanks with no power of their own carry a battery-powered tracker or a Bluetooth tag that reports through whichever tractor or truck is nearest.

During harvest that map is the operation's dispatch board. The combine operator sees where the empty cart is, the truck driver sees whether the pile at the field edge is ready, and the manager sees which fields are done and which machines are stopped. The same map answers a February question about where a piece of equipment was left, without anyone driving out to look.

A geofence drawn around each field turns the day's movement into a record: which machines entered, when, and for how long. For a custom operator, that is the invoice, and it is one the customer can be shown on a map rather than argued about. For a farm, it is the cost of each crop in machine hours, fuel and labour, field by field, which is the number that decides what gets planted next year.

The PTO or implement input on the GO device separates the hours that count from the ones that do not. A tractor idling at the field edge while the operator waits for a truck is engine time, not working time, and the record shows both. Sprayer operators use the same record to show which fields were sprayed and when, which is a compliance question as much as a billing one.

A combine may run 300 engine hours in six weeks and then sit for ten months. Calendar-based maintenance misses both halves of that pattern. Engine-hours reminders from the GO device schedule the service intervals as the hours accumulate, and on machines that report through the CAN bus, fault codes reach the manager's phone as the machine logs them. A charging or hydraulic warning caught in the field at noon is a part ordered for tomorrow; the same warning ignored is a combine down in the best week of the harvest.

The road trucks are maintained the same way, with mileage and engine hours together, and a pre-trip inspection in the Geotab Drive app for the trucks that carry a driver on the highway. Fuel-card integration matches the fuel bought to the truck that burned it, and idling reports show where the diesel goes when the truck is not moving.

Agricultural hauling has its own hours-of-service exemptions in both Canada and the United States, tied to distance from the farm and to the season, and a grain truck that crosses that line during harvest needs a log. The Geotab Drive app supports the agricultural exemptions, so the driver records the exempt miles as exempt and the regulated ones properly, and the record is there if the truck is stopped at a scale. High Point GPS sets the exemption up for the trucks and drivers it applies to and leaves the rest of the fleet out of it.

Remote yards and fuel tanks are targets, and a machine parked at a field edge is one too. Geofence alarms report when a machine or a tagged implement leaves the yard outside working hours, and the tracker keeps reporting as it goes, which is how stolen equipment comes back. Fuel-level data from the trucks that report it, matched against the fuel bought, shows a tank that is being drained on the weekend.