What are the Benefits of Using RTK in Agriculture? 6 Examples That Lead to Automation

The growing interest in RTK in the agricultural sector stems from on-the-ground needs to simultaneously reduce labor and improve accuracy.

Until now, much of farm work has relied on the intuition and visual judgment of experienced operators, and fine-scale accuracy in tasks such as straight-line driving, maintaining row spacing, managing spray coverage, and identifying field boundaries has affected yields, quality, and even working time. RTK, which increases the precision of positioning information and makes it easier to standardize operations, is therefore attracting attention.

RTK is not simply a technology for determining position. In agriculture, it is important to regard it as a foundational technology for automation and semi-automation—enabling machinery to run straight, reducing overlaps and gaps in work, repeating operations to the same standard each time, and linking records to maps to inform subsequent processes. Its major value is that it makes it easier to achieve consistent quality regardless of who performs the work, rather than relying solely on human skill.

In this article, we organize the benefits of using RTK in agriculture into six practical use cases directly applicable to day-to-day operations. For practitioners, we clearly explain what will change with implementation, why it leads to automation, and the perspectives to check before adoption.

Table of Contents

• Why RTK Is Gaining Attention in Agriculture

• Example 1: The accuracy of straight-line travel improves and the variability of the work decreases.

• Example 2: Makes it easier to reduce misalignment during sowing and transplanting.

• Example 3: Easier to reduce duplicate and missed spraying for fertilization and pest control.

• Example 4 Managing field boundaries and work areas becomes easier

• Example 5: It becomes easier to organize the flow of harvesting and transportation.

• Example 6 Linking work records with location information makes improvements easier

• Practical points to note before introducing RTK

• Summary

Why RTK Is Gaining Attention in Agriculture

RTK is a system that enables the use of high-precision positioning information in real time. In agricultural settings, differences in position on the order of several centimeters (several in) often affect work quality. For example, when running machinery along ridges, when you want to keep the spacing between an already-worked row and the next row consistent, or when you want to proceed efficiently without overlapping spraying or tilling, positional accuracy directly translates into operational accuracy.

General positioning information can be useful for roughly determining your current location, but it may lack the accuracy required to stabilize an agricultural machine’s travel line or to reproduce the exact same line as before. In that respect, RTK is well suited to aligning work lines, and its characteristic is that it makes parts that used to depend on visual judgement or intuition easy to quantify. This very quantification is a major gateway to automation.

When people think of automation in agriculture, they tend to imagine machines operating completely unmanned. However, in reality, rather than moving straight to full automation, it usually starts with incremental measures such as driving assistance, visualization of the work area, reproduction of positions, and accumulation of records. RTK is a technology that can be involved at any of those stages and often becomes the foundation linking reduced manual labor, semi-automation, and more advanced automatic control.

Another important point is that RTK helps reduce differences in operator skill. In agriculture, even when using the same machinery, the finish and work speed can vary depending on the operator. That is not necessarily a bad thing—it reflects field experience—but with ongoing labor shortages, operations that can maintain consistent quality with limited personnel are required. By using RTK, standards for driving and positioning can be clarified, making it easier to improve the reproducibility of work.

Moreover, farmland covers large areas and work is repeated seasonally, so once a standard is established it tends to remain useful the next day, the next month, and the following year. If location information can be used as that standard, it becomes easier to manage each field, compare work histories, and identify problem areas, which not only streamlines on-site labor but also contributes to visualizing management across the entire operation.

In other words, the reason RTK is gaining attention in agriculture is not simply because it provides high positioning accuracy. It offers benefits that are fundamental to field operations: standardizing tasks, keeping records, making continuous improvement easier, and building a foundation for future automation.

Example 1 Improved straight-line travel accuracy reduces variability in operations

One of the primary benefits of using RTK in agriculture is the stabilization of straight-line travel. In farm work, keeping a straight course may seem simple but is actually difficult; when traveling while maintaining a fixed direction over long distances, slight deviations can become large errors toward the end. This is especially true in large fields, where reference points are distant and maintaining the line by visual observation alone is often difficult.

If straight-line stability is poor, all subsequent operations—tillage, land leveling, seeding, fertilization, and pest control—will be affected. When row spacing becomes uneven, it becomes harder to establish reference lines for the next tasks, which can cause overlaps or missed areas. As a result, not only does work time increase, but it can also lead to wasted materials and uneven crop growth.

Using RTK makes it easier to follow predefined travel lines while precisely determining the machine's current position. This allows operators to avoid being constantly occupied with corrective actions, reducing the burden of steering and route checking. Even without full autonomous driving, simply using it as driving assistance can significantly change the perceived workload.

This effect is particularly large during long working periods. When people become fatigued, their attention drops and small deviations tend to increase. It is not uncommon to be running smoothly in the morning but see accuracy decline in the afternoon. Using RTK makes it easier to suppress variations caused by time of day and physical condition, helping to stabilize work quality. This also has great value in that it makes it easier to bring performance close to the same level even when the person in charge changes.

Also, when straight-line travel is stable, there is an added benefit: planning work becomes easier. It becomes simpler to organize steps such as how many passes are required, where to enter and where to turn around, and in what order to carry out tasks, which reduces waste in the allocation of machines and personnel. If travel lines are less likely to be disrupted, it is also easier to keep track of how much of the field has been completed and to resume work after an interruption.

Agricultural automation does not mean simply leaving everything to machines; it begins with creating the conditions that allow machines to operate stably. Improving the accuracy of straight-line driving is a very practical first step. RTK is a technology that, while reducing the burden on operators, suppresses variability in work accuracy and creates an environment that makes it easier to move on to the next stage of automation.

Example 2: Makes it easier to reduce positional misalignment during sowing and transplanting

During sowing and transplanting, how uniformly positions are aligned greatly affects subsequent management tasks. If row spacing and plant spacing are uneven, not only does growth variability occur, but later operations—inter-row cultivation, topdressing, weeding, pest and disease control, and harvesting—also become more difficult. Even small-looking misalignments can have a non-negligible impact on the overall operation as the area increases.

Especially in tasks that require repeatable accuracy, the initial line is important. If the first line is even slightly disturbed, subsequent work will follow it and errors tend to accumulate across the entire field. Conversely, if you can establish the initial reference with high precision, later processes are more likely to remain stable. RTK is strong at creating this reference.

When using RTK for seeding operations, it becomes easier to maintain consistent spacing between adjacent rows. This reduces overlap and gaps, making the entire field neater and easier to work with. A tidy layout not only improves appearance but also directly affects material application, crop monitoring, and machine travel efficiency. Because positions are aligned, subsequent tasks are easier to mechanize, resulting in labor savings.

The same applies to transplanting operations. When rows of seedlings become disordered, not only does subsequent management become difficult, but situations that require unnecessary care increase. Being able to stably and reproducibly recreate beds and rows also helps reduce the psychological burden on workers. If RTK makes it easier to work from the same positional reference each time, it becomes easier to maintain consistent quality even in processes where differences in experience tend to show.

Moreover, the value of RTK is not just its on-the-spot accuracy. It lies in making it easier to refer to the same reference line the next day or in a different operation. If the lines used at seeding, transplanting, and during management tasks are connected by location information, coordination between each process becomes easier. This also serves as an entry point for data utilization in agriculture, leading not to a one-off improvement in accuracy but to the streamlining of the entire workflow.

In agriculture, you cannot always work under the same conditions. Soil conditions, weather, working hours, and personnel allocation vary from day to day. In that context, having a stable reference even for position alone is a major advantage. RTK increases the positional accuracy required for seeding and transplanting and plays a role in supporting the reproducibility of operations with an eye toward downstream processes. When considering automation, first aligning planting positions provides the foundation.

Example 3 Easier to Reduce Overlapping and Missed Spraying in Fertilization and Pest Control

Fertilization and pest control are operations where you want to treat the entire field uniformly while avoiding both over-application and missed areas. However, in real-world field work, because application is performed while moving across large areas, it is easy for the extent of treated area to become unclear, and it is not uncommon for operators to rely on their own sense. Especially in fields where the scenery is monotonous or where traces of work are hard to see, overlapping applications and missed spots are likely to occur.

When overlapping applications occur, not only does material waste increase, but localized over-application can also adversely affect crops. Conversely, missed applications can lead to uneven growth and insufficient pest control. In other words, fertilization and pest control should not be treated as tasks to simply complete; it is important to manage how widely and to what extent they have been applied.

By leveraging RTK, you can work while knowing the machine’s position with high precision, making it easier to organize where you have passed and which areas remain unprocessed. In addition to stabilizing travel lines, being able to capture the work area on a map makes it easier to reduce overlap and missed spots. A major advantage is that it helps reduce ambiguous actions such as becoming unsure and backtracking, or overlapping slightly just in case.

This benefit grows with larger areas or when multiple personnel are involved. Because people differ in how they move through the site and how they perform checks, management accuracy tends to vary; however, using RTK as the reference makes it easier to reduce variability between individual operators. As a result, the standardization of work quality progresses.

Fertilization and pest control are also fields well suited to automation, because they can readily link positional information with application control. Decisions about where to apply inputs, which areas to avoid, and where to stop operations are inherently suited to being tied to location. RTK improves the reliability of the positional information that underlies these decisions, making it easier to incorporate automatic control.

What's even more important is that it makes post-work review easier. If you can track which plots were treated and when, along with their locations, it becomes easier to compare them with growth outcomes and to reassess future operations. Not only does application accuracy improve, but the ability to more easily verify the results of work leads to continuous improvement.

In efforts to improve agricultural efficiency, shortening working time tends to get most of the attention, but reducing waste is just as important. RTK makes it easier to suppress both overlaps and gaps that commonly occur in fertilization and pest control, supporting both material management and work quality. This is not only labor-saving but also an important step toward automation in terms of standardizing operational accuracy.

Example 4: Easier Management of Field Boundaries and Work Areas

On farms, understanding field boundaries is more important than you might imagine. If information such as where a target plot begins and ends, where entry is allowed, and whether any untreated areas remain is unclear, both the accuracy of operations and the ease of management fall dramatically. This is especially true when working across multiple plots in succession or in fields with complex shapes, where the precision of boundary management determines overall efficiency.

Traditionally, boundaries have often been understood based on local landmarks and workers' memories. However, landmarks can be hard to see, and changes in season or crop conditions can alter the landscape and make judgment difficult. Different people may also perceive boundaries differently. Such ambiguity can lead to missed work, encroachment into adjacent plots, and unnecessary travel.

Using RTK makes it easier to manage field boundaries and work areas as location information. This lets you proceed while clearly defining the scope of the work, reducing unnecessary movement and hesitation in decision-making. When boundaries are clear, it’s also easier to see how far you’ve progressed, and it makes handling work that spans multiple days or resumes after interruptions more robust.

This is related not only to simple improvements in work efficiency but also to safety and manageability. That is because it makes it easier to reduce risks such as accidentally entering excluded areas or driving through places that should not be traversed. Around farmland there are locations that require careful judgment, such as waterways, slopes, muddy patches, and edges that are difficult to work on. When RTK makes positional references clear, it also becomes easier to take such places into account.

Also, when boundary information is organized, it becomes easier to utilize not only for machine operations but also for record keeping and reporting. It becomes easier to clarify which plot, at what time, and which task was performed, facilitating handovers between personnel and the review of work histories. By accumulating the conditions and challenges for each field, the accuracy of next year’s planning is also likely to improve.

In advancing agricultural automation, controlling machines alone is not enough. Only when spatial information—where machines should operate and what to avoid—is properly established does automation become practical. RTK plays the role of supporting the accuracy of this spatial information. Easier management of field boundaries and work areas reduces confusion on site and provides the practical benefit of minimizing discrepancies between work planning and execution.

Example 5 Easier to organize harvesting and transport flow

In harvesting operations, the movements of machinery and people tend to become complex, and it is necessary to consider efficiency not only in simply harvesting but also in where to enter, the order in which to move around, and where to transport the crop. Especially during harvest time, it is often a race against the clock, and confusion, backtracking, or unnecessary waiting in the field can have a significant impact on the overall operation.

Problems at harvest time are not limited to the large amount of work. Many decisions occur simultaneously: routes within the field, the positional relationships between machines, movement to collection points, and identifying unharvested areas. The more crowded the site becomes, the harder it is to manage the whole operation by intuition alone. That’s where the idea of organizing movement flows based on location information is useful.

By using RTK, you can more accurately organize the positions of harvest targets, the current locations of machines, travel lines, and transport routes. This doesn't necessarily mean advanced unmanned control. To begin with, even simply making it easier to align where harvesters and transport vehicles should pass, thereby reducing unnecessary turns and crossings, can be effective.

At harvest sites, even slight disruptions in movement patterns can cause significant losses. For example, repeatedly passing through areas that have already been covered, machines overlapping at choke points, or going back and forth searching for untreated plots—when these things accumulate, they affect not only time but also fuel and personnel deployment. When RTK clarifies positional references, it becomes easier to reproduce movement plans on site and for operations to flow smoothly.

Furthermore, because harvesting and transport involve multiple interconnected processes, there is value in making location information easy to share. If it becomes clear what has been completed and where to go next, coordination errors decrease and decision-making speed increases. This is especially important at sites with limited personnel. It moves the situation away from one in which overall decisions are concentrated on a single veteran toward one in which multiple people can act based on the information.

In terms of automation, optimizing the routes for harvesting and transport is important. To operate machines automatically, it is necessary to define where and how they should travel. RTK provides the foundation for improving the reproducibility of those routes. Harvesting is one of the most labor-intensive processes in agriculture, and for that reason it is a field where improvements in positioning accuracy tend to produce noticeable benefits.

As a result, RTK makes it easier to organize not only the accuracy of the harvest itself but the entire sequence of movements associated with harvesting. It offers very practical value in reducing on-site confusion, streamlining workflows, and increasing processing capacity within limited time.

Example 6 Linking work records with location information makes it easier to improve

The benefits of introducing RTK are not limited to immediate on-site work. Rather, in the long term, a major advantage is being able to link work records with location information. In agriculture, the same crop can show differences in growth depending on the location, and to examine why those differences occurred, it is necessary to know as accurately as possible when, where, and what was done.

However, when records are vague, it becomes difficult to make improvements. For example, even if you want to review fertilizer application rates, confirm the effectiveness of pest control, or investigate the causes of poor growth, comparisons are difficult if the work locations or timing are unclear. Even having a subjective sense that "this area was not doing well" is insufficient to apply to the following year.

With RTK, it becomes easier to record work positions with high precision and to capture work history on a map. Being able to link locations—where you sowed, the routes you sprayed, the plots you harvested, and the points where problems occurred—to their positions makes it easier to examine causal relationships with work results. This is of great value in the field, as it makes it easier to preserve accumulated experience as data.

Also, records with location information have the advantage of being robust against personnel changes and multi-person work. Information that exists only in someone’s head is hard to pass on, but if it’s stored together with location data, another person can understand it more easily. In agriculture, where the same person cannot always be assigned to the same plot due to peak-season support or seasonal employment, this reproducibility is important.

Furthermore, by organizing records, it becomes easier to run an improvement cycle. You can examine which tasks were efficient, which sections suffered losses, and where variability tends to occur, and use those findings to revise the next run’s planning, machine settings, and travel routes. Merely accumulating data has no meaning, but if location data are highly accurate, the reliability of comparisons increases and it becomes easier to make improvement decisions.

Agricultural automation is not achieved by automating control alone. Only when the continuous flow of planning, execution, recording, and review is connected can sustained efficiency improvements be realized. In that sense, RTK is not only a technology for operating machines but also a foundational technology for driving improvements. When it becomes clear where and what was done, people in the field can make more reproducible decisions rather than relying solely on intuition.

Practical considerations to keep in mind before implementing RTK

RTK can significantly aid agricultural automation and labor savings, but implementing it doesn't mean everything will work perfectly right away. To achieve results in real-world operations, it's important to understand both the characteristics of the technology and the conditions on site. If you overlook this, you may not see the expected benefits, or it may take time to become proficient.

The first thing to be aware of is that RTK is a technology for improving positional accuracy, and it does not, by itself, solve every operational problem. For example, even if driving lines are aligned, the finished result will not be stable if adjustments on the machine side are insufficient. Field-side factors—implement width settings, field conditions, tire slip, muddy soil, and tendencies when turning—also affect the outcome. The more you use RTK, the more other sources of error may become apparent.

Next, consideration of the communication and reception environment is also necessary. Even if a device is easy to use in locations with an open sky, stability can vary in conditions affected by surrounding terrain or structures. People tend to assume farmland is fine because it’s outdoors, but reception conditions change depending on the environment—near trees, along slopes, or around facilities, for example. Before deployment, it is important to verify whether it can be operated easily in the intended field environment.

Also, to maximize the benefits of introducing it, you need to first clarify which tasks you will use it for and how. Whether you want to use it for straight-line steering assistance, to improve seeding accuracy, or for boundary management and record-keeping will change the required operations and evaluation metrics. If you introduce it while the purpose is vague, it often seems useful but fails to become established in daily operation. In the field, adoption tends to be easier if you avoid aiming for too much from the start and gradually expand use, beginning with the processes that carry the greatest burden.

Moreover, operational design that is easy for workers to use is also crucial. Even highly capable systems can go unused during busy periods if their configuration is too complex or preparation takes too long. On site, not only accuracy but also ease of startup, ease of use, and the ease of reviewing records are important factors. Whether a solution becomes established after deployment depends not only on technical performance but also on whether it can be incorporated into daily work without undue burden.

And to maximize the value of RTK, you should not let it end as a one-time implementation; an approach that uses recorded data to drive iterative improvements is essential. By using it while reviewing which tasks became easier, where errors occurred, and which areas saw the greatest effect, it will grow into a form that fits the worksite. Automation should be advanced step by step. If you think of the process as first establishing the positional reference, then standardizing the operations, and finally linking records to control, it becomes easier to appreciate the benefits of introducing RTK.

Summary

The benefits of using RTK in agriculture are not simply that positioning becomes more accurate. From stabilizing straight-line driving, suppressing positional deviations in seeding and transplanting, reducing overlaps and omissions in fertilization and pest control, clarifying field boundaries, and organizing harvest and transport routes, to enhancing work records, its value lies in tidying daily farm operations and creating a foundation for automation.

In agricultural fields, the experience of skilled workers is a powerful asset, but to address labor shortages and increasing workloads, it is necessary to create systems that do not rely solely on experience. RTK is an effective technology to support those systems, helping to create an environment where consistent quality can be achieved regardless of who performs the work. In particular, in agriculture—where the same tasks are repeated—the reproducibility of positional references directly leads to greater efficiency and easier improvement.

The important thing is to view RTK not as the introduction of a standalone device but as infrastructure for standardizing work, visualizing records, and preparing for future automation. Even if you start with familiar uses such as vehicle guidance and boundary confirmation, expanding from there to seeding, spraying, harvesting, and record management will allow you to gradually change operations across the entire site.

If you want to more easily utilize high-precision positioning information in agriculture, it is important to consider an environment that enables RTK to be used in a form that is easy to handle on-site. For example, LRTK, as an iPhone-mounted GNSS high-precision positioning device, is an easily adoptable option to introduce in situations where you want to improve position verification, record-keeping, and on-site use of positioning. For operational staff who want to increase the accuracy of farmland location management and work records and lay the groundwork for future automation and labor savings, it is worth considering RTK utilization as a first step to integrating it into the field.