- Overlap: How bad is it? I have heard of stories of how some farmers could drive, straight as an arrow and with no overlap, hour after hour, day after day; but, I knew that I overlapped when I drove, and I had seen many fields in which overlap was evident. But, just how much was this overlap? Could it be measured? Was I trying to solve the problem of eliminating the overlap, if it really wasn’t a significant problem? After some investigation, it became apparent to me that no one had actually measured the overlap of manual driving. We needed a way to measure this and we had to do this without the operator being aware of the measurement being taken. I was well aware of an operator being able to drive more accurately when he or she was aware that someone was watching. I knew first-hand that I always was much sharper, and drove more accurately when someone was watching or where it would be noticed from the road. The overlap measurement must be done without the driver being aware of our intent.
We devised three non-intrusive ways to measure overlap:.
a) Stop and spot and measure the actual overlap with a measuring tape.
b) Measure the width of the field, and the width of the implement. By counting the number of passes made to complete the field, one could calculate the overlap. The number of passes multiplied by the width of the implement would equal the field width. Any excess passes to this would be overlap.
c) I rented a plane and had my passenger take a number of pictures of a farmer driving as I buzzed the operation from behind, without the farmer being aware of our presence. After analyzing the photos for relative widths; it was determined that the overlap increased and was proportional to the implement’s width.
The overall average overlap was 10% of the implement’s width. A ten-foot implement would typically result in one foot of overlap, whereas a 50 foot implement would result in five feet of overlap. Now we knew, and yes it would be a worthwhile project to reduce or even eliminate the overlap.