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Space-age solutions and futuristic concepts on display at Germany's leading farm equipment showA host of wonders were on display at this year's show- from the world's largest forage harvester to a model plane with autopilot and colour cam that can record weed density in fieldsby NORMAN DUNNA herbicide sprayer with simultaneous online weed identification? A private spy-in-the-sky for scanning crop disease on your farm? These are just a couple of the space-age solutions on display at the show at Germany's Agritechnica farm equipment show this winter.Special planes had to be laid on to fly Russian and Ukrainian farmers thousands of miles to this year's show -- confirmation of the new interest from the east in the latest agricultural technology offered by 1,600 exhibitors from 35 countries on the 50-acre site. The 252,000 farmers and machinery specialists visiting the event this November in Hanover was the largest gate in its 20 year history. Here's a sampling of what was on display.
The new system, which can also work with mounted sprayer for liquid N, was presented at Agritechnica 2005 alongside an even more ambitious concept from AgriCon. Working with universities in Germany, the Kverneland Group subsidiary has helped develop a herbicide spraying system which can react to weed type and density in the field by spraying exact doses of the appropriate herbicide on identified weed patches. Where there are no weeds, no spay is applied. Trials on German farms indicate that the equivalent of up to $16 Cdn an acre can be saved in sugar beet through a 57 per cent reduction in dicotyledon spray and 46 per cent reduction in grass weed herbicide by this concept. The system also offers the inbuilt environmental advantages of spot spraying and the full documentation that comes now with every computer-controlled system. The centrepiece of this futuristic concept is the Rau 3-chamber sprayer. Rau is also a Kverneland subsidiary daughter firm of the leading farm equipment manufacturer Kverneland and the 3-chamber sprayer was designed with input from the University of Bonn. The sprayer features three tanks for different herbicides, each tank with its own boom line and nozzles covering a total of 21 metres of working width. A central computer reacts to weed identification by injecting the appropriate herbicide from one of the tanks into its boom line. To make application even more specific, the Rau 3-chamber sprayer booms feature seven separately-operational sections, each of three metres. Currently, the sprayer applies the three herbicides -- for example, for grass weeds, dicotyledons and perhaps thistles -- according to a chip card with field weed map readings by the sprayer computer. The field map is created via a camera-supported GPS weed survey of the field with software developed to identify major weeds in the standing crop. Coming soon, though, is a system with cameras mounted on the sprayer boom -- with lighting to allow for night operation -- which relays images via Ethernet to an online databank where the weeds are identified. This information is then instantaneously returned to the sprayer-computer for calculating herbicide type and dose. "We are working towards a system that allows round-the-clock work whenever the best conditions are available for spraying on big farms or by contractors," says Prof. Roland Gerhards, a specialist in computerized weed identification and its role in precision farming with the University of Hohenheim, near Stuttgart, who is working with AgriCon. The professor adds that the new system offers the potential for considerable savings, which far outweigh any additional expense for the weed identification equipment and special sprayer.
A more conventional innovation from Lemken, which offers better acreage performance for large-scale cropping units is the six-metre working width Solitair 10 cultivator/drill, designed with a 5,800 litre hopper for mounting on powerful tool-carrier tractors such as the Claas Xerion. The pneumatic Solitair coulter bar is mounted separately on three-point linkage with hydraulic depth control. Working speeds of up to 15 km/h have been recorded for the Xerion/Solitair rig, which folds to three metres wide for road transport.
In 2005 in the Ukraine, the new Horsch drill combination drilled 1,650 acres of sunflowers in 24 hours and, four days later, 1,830 acres of corn within the same time. Both these have been acknowledged as world records for stubble sowing and, in each case, liquid fertilizer was applied by the Challenger crawler pulled combination at the same time. Horsch also launched a novel low-till and precision fertilizing single-pass system for row crops like sugar beet or maize. Only the actual crop row is cultivated by the Horsch Focus CS, with up to 11 chisel tines working down to 35 centimetres. Fertilizer can be piped to each tine for placing under the proposed seed row. The rest of the field surface is left undisturbed. Each loosened soil row is then formed into a small furrow ready for the drill by a following pair of ground-driven discs.
It is also very cost-effective because it includes no self-loading equipment, permits one-man operation of mixing and feeding by remote control from the tractor cab and has a low-draught requirement of just 50 to 60 hp. The Keenan SD series comes with integrated electronic feed weigher and electro-hydraulic stand and automatic coupling.
Krone also offers new photo-optical sensors on the maize header with computer backup to identify ripeness. The computer calculates dry matter content from the colour and automatically varies silage chopping length -- short chop for dry, long for less mature, for optimum compaction in the clamp or tower silo. An economy feature with the Big X is that roadwork and manoeuvring require only one of the engines, the second engine coming into play during actual harvesting work. And other new agricultural leviathans at Agritechnica
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