This would be fantastic. I'd really love to see this kind of detail in the game and hopefully it will be at one stage. There's already the framework for expansion and I think the CnC devs are really open minded.

Soil management is very important in farming and I'd love to perhaps see an ability to hire an agronomist who would perhaps give you advice based on current in game events.

There will no doubt be soil management in this game, it's such an integral part of farming that you can't leave it out of an advance farming simulator.

you could tie an element of soil management to the technology available.

i.e.
at one end you have the manual core sample taken in a grid pattern subject to a large grid spacing and imprecise error.

at the other end you have harvesters with real time yield monitoring allied to very high end GPS and an RTK base station, with historic data from multiple years per field, and allied equipment (tractors etc) that are equipped also with high end GPS corrected from the RTK base station which use CANBus etc to control the output of sprayers/spreaders etc based on the latest yield maps from the last harvest and other data gathered from machines that also make passes over the ground.

GPS in itself comes in many flavours, for example:
you start out with older tractors or basic tractors devoid of GPS.

with older or basic tractors you can retro-fit 3rd-party basic GPS guidance which gives 30cm CEP 95% of the time using a light-bar which would be good enough for basic spraying and fertiliser spreading and could have some basic auto-steer function at additional cost that ties into the hydrostatic steering, but when it came to precision tasks like planting or even cultivation an "average" driver would be better.

the next GPS step would be Deutz/Claas/etc own basic GPS system which fully ties into the tractor systems and makes use of the multi-function display (MFD) and headland management system (HMS), giving auto-steer and the ability for the GPS to control the lowering/lifting etc of implements during the auto-turn at the headland with e.g. a 15cm CEP 95% of the time, which would be good enough for cultivation tasks, and would exceed the skill of an average driver in precision planting, but would still fall short of a highly skilled driver who may only use the GPS in a passive mode recording the track and providing other data, this GPS would be a one-off payment for the GPS system and there would be no subscription payable.

the next GPS system would be much the same as the above, but with a higher quality more expensive receiver with a higher PPS (Positions Per Second), making it more suitable for higher speed precision tasks, in its "free" mode it offers the same e.g. 15cm CEP 95% of the time but at the higher PPS, but you can as you choose subscribe to a correction service for a weekly, monthly or yearly fee which gives <10cm CEP 95% of the time, the downside of this is the fee for the correction service is per machine.

the final step in GPS would be the above GPS without the subscription correction service, but in addition you buy an RTK base station which can service ALL your high-end GPS systems, an RTK base station is a very high end GPS capable of survey grade observation which you place on a static known point geographically which provides real time differential correction (correction between the known geographic point and the GPS provided position) via an encrypted radio link that it broadcasts which your GPS equipped machines use to correct their own calculated positions, which provides sub <2cm CEP 95% of the time, this is the best system when you need either the best precision &/or you have lots of machines equipped with GPS that's a subscription service per machine would be very costly.

which you could transpose to the better the equipped GPS the less seed or fertiliser you use, there will be less overplanting, less fuel used, the data gathered from machines like yield maps etc will be clearer, and you average AI will be better at doing jobs more precisely.


take ground compaction, you can gain far more advantage in using controlled traffic in fields, in essence the ONLY traffic that will go beyond the outermost part of the headland, is the harvester, sprayers/spreaders (tractor mounted or self propelled), and the cultivation/planting equipment, and the only places that get deep cultivation/subsoiling are the headland, where the harvester has made its runs across the field, where the tramline from sprayers/spreaders would be, and where the tractor pulling the cultivation/planting equipment has been, because you have the in-field GPS tracks to-hand which you can pull from all the respective equipment and post-process it to form the deep cultivation/subsoiling track that will be used, which can save a huge amount of diesel and time vs. doing the whole field.

take something like setting up your fertiliser spreader, you have one school of thought preached by manufactures and farm related educational establishments of using pans laid out across the working width in a static test, you have the other school of thought in getting on your hands and knees for 45mins in the field after making a single run with the spreader and observing the actual results, given granular fertiliser will happily bounce out of pans etc which slues the results vs. the texture of soil with young plant growth on which mitigates bounce you observe with pans, i.e. the difference between the two represents a saving using the latter even though it may not be taken as being "correct" by the former groups way of thinking.

If we get GPS in CnC can I place it on my tractor in RL? I don't have it