Gold for an old idea revisited
The gold award went to a company called Nexat GmbH which has built a gantry type tractor that is designed to be automated from the outset. The machine appears to be an attempt to bridge the gap between smaller robots with specific crop care tasks, and standard tractors which tend to have a much heavier workload.
Awards for automation in other areas
Case New Holland (CNH) picked up two silver medals - both for bringing further automation to existing machines in a bid to make them more efficient. The first is for its OptiSpread system which aims to create "uniform lateral distribution of the material chopped by combine harvesters".
Bales of one weight
The second development applies to big square balers and is intended to ensure they are all of uniform size, shape and density.
Air filter cleaning
Fendt, which is usually associated with super high-tech wizardry, has won a silver for a task that is a little more prosaic, and that is keeping the engine air filter clean. Its latest system relies upon a store of compressed air to pressurise the inside of the filter whenever there is a drop in supply to the inlet manifold.
Awards for taking care of the soil
The soil is the literal foundation of agriculture and taking proper care of it is now a hot topic. Claas has been looking at how to prevent soil compaction and believes its Terranimo soil compaction risk display is one aid to the avoidance of damage.
Claas claims to be able to calculate this through information supplied by its Cemos system on aspects such as the soil type/condition, axle loads or tyre pressures.
This data is then fed into the Terranimo tool which simulates soil loading and load bearing capacity. A series of lights will then show up on the control screen to warn the driver of any adverse effect the tractor is having on the soil.Traffic planning
In a similar bid to manage traffic on vulnerable soils, Rauch, in a joint venture with AgriCircle AG, has created a service by which farmers can calculate the navigability of tillage land in advance. The local soil moisture is estimated by means of radar measurements performed by the Sentinel-1 satellites in combination with weather data. The user then inputs the data pertinent to the machine to be used.
The Compaction Prevention System (CPS) from Agtech 2030 also won a silver medal and it offers much the same service, although there would appear to be a greater emphasis on integrating the data into a farm management plan.
Other awards were given for increasing the safety of autonomous vehicles, harvesting broccoli, irrigation machinery and inter-row weeding, among others.