Carlson AgStar

AgStar, Agricultural & Irrigation Software, offers a complete package of land-leveling tools for agricultural and irrigation purposes. It carries a versatile suite of commands designed to simplify and speed up the professional surveyor’s work, as well as reduce costs by minimizing the amount of dirt to move.

Agstar handles both the survey and the design sides of land-leveling, allowing you to survey large fields with GPS, and then determine the optimal field design requiring the least amount of dirt moved. The field design tool can be set to a user-specified field slope, or to search for the optimal slope. A host of other design parameters can be specified, including cut/fill ratio, amount of dirt to import or export, and constraints on the range of slopes to search. With Agstar, you can also subdivide the field and assign different designs to each subdivision, which is useful if you want crowns in the field.

For data collection, Agstar supports a wide range of GPS RTK receivers, including such popular brands as Navcom, Ashtech, Leica, Sokkia, and Trimble; if you have it, Agstar probably supports it, which means you may not even need to upgrade your hardware.

AgStar runs on IntelliCAD, which is built-in, so there is no need to buy an additional CAD engine to run the software. The new release includes updated GPS drivers for new receivers from John Deere, Ashtech, and others. There’s also the ability to work with geo-referenced aerial images and SHP (shape) files.