This cache was placed to bring awareness of agricultural technology that is being used across Victoria.
The technology that geocachers use to find caches is the same technology that farmers and their advisors use for many aspects of agricultural production. Yes, GPS is used in agriculture. Specifically, GPS can be used to automatically control steering of tractors and headers through the paddock. During harvest, GPS is used to tag sensor data such as crop yield and moisture to coordinates on the Earth’s surface to make yield and soil nutrient maps. This helps farmers to understand the differences in productivity between different parts of the paddock and make better decisions about input requirements such as fertiliser.
These topics are taught here on campus at Longerenong College. During July 2018, instruction of the ‘Precision Agriculture’ course included an overview of Geocaching with an ad hoc hiding and finding of hidden items across Longerenong College campus by the 28 students. These students and their lecturer, SpacePlowboy, wanted to place a cache here to recognise their experiential education with respect to GPS.
The road into the College is public space - you have permission to search on both sides of the fence. The area may be busy at times so please watch for traffic and exercise caution. There are plenty of places to park off-road.
Please note the college has an open day in August and hosts other events from time to time. The Wimmera Machinery Field Days is just up the road in the first week of March.
The cache is a large ammo can with pen, log and a starting swag that includes a souvenir Birchip tea towel and BCG notebook for the first and second finders. There are also plenty of souvenir pens from K-State University - handy for the next micro you find, but please make sure you leave a pen with log book. Remember it is always appreciated when you ‘trade up’.
The cache was planned during a visit by SpacePlowboy as part of joint project between Longerenong College, Birchip Cropping Group (BCG) and Kansas State University and is maintained by KH2ici.