So you think you know what “precision” farming means? You’re probably selling the technology short. Equipment makers around the world are set to launch tools that will let farmers do things we have never, ever been able to do before
A mere decade ago, to be on the cutting edge of precision farming meant using a GPS receiver equipped with a light bar guidance system to help you steer a straight line. That receiver relied on the standard WAAS signal with its one-metre accuracy, a technological breakthrough.
Today, that equipment no longer fits into anyone’s definition of precision farming.
Now, RTK guidance networks allow for nearly perfect year-after-year repeatability, enabling farmers to travel exactly within the tire tracks they left last year, if they want to. But even that capability doesn’t come close to demonstrating what modern precision farming is all about.
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In fact, many in the industry think it’s time for an entirely new term to explain the direction in which modern technology is pushing agriculture. Their term is “smart farming” and they use it to describe an overall strategy for intelligent, efficient and sustainable production.
To get “smart,” farmers need to adopt a wide variety of the newest and best technologies and practices from industries everywhere. These efficiencies are achievable, insists Roland Hörner, head of technology at DLG, the German Agricultural Society that organizes Agritechnica, the world’s largest farm machinery show held in Hanover, Germany.
“Precision agriculture is still riding the steering wave a bit,” agrees David Swain, AGCO’s manager of AFS marketing for North America. “The next wave is going to be telematics.”
Already starting to make its way to the showroom, this new wave integrates multiple technologies and objectives, including the communication of CAN(BUS) information back to an office, sending a map from the office to the field and then confirming the completed job back for the office after the fact.
It also includes, says Swain, “what you’re seeing now, which is some of the lead-follower technology and the ability for autonomous vehicles.”
By integrating all those capabilities, telematics goes to the heart of what the term smart farming encompasses. “Put simply, smart farming allows the agricultural industry to bring management levels more typical of trial plots to field-scale crops,” says a recent DLG press release.
DLG put a strong focus on that concept in its 2011 edition of Agritechnica, held in the fall.
That focus reflects what is happening in agriculture generally, suggests Swain. “When I was in college, the school of agriculture (taught) certain things. When you go back now, the whole dynamic is completely different. When we look at precision farming, maybe we need to change the nomenclature. Maybe this isn’t precision farming, this is just agricultural technology. We’re working with tools that are making farming more efficient and more profitable.”
Even supporters of the name change warn that the new terminology mustn’t obscure the fact that precision farming hasn’t achieved everything it said it would do.
“What precision farming has not so far achieved is to make general data management on the farm compatible and simple,” says Hans Griepentrog, Max Eyth professor of instrumentation and test engineering at the University of Hohenheim in Germany. “It is precisely here that smart farming aims to tackle the problem and develop precision farming further.”
While discussing smart farming strategies at Agritechnica, Griepentrog stressed he sees the need to blend data from a variety of sources in order to improve famers’ ability to make real-time field decisions.
Griepentrog also thinks farmers must have the ability to use that data to achieve varied, even competing objectives if they choose. For example, a combine operator should have the option of choosing between managing the machine to minimize loss or to minimize time spent in the field so the combine can cover more acres in a day.
“What are required here are strategies that support the operator and offer them genuine choices,” Griepentrog says.
Some of the major manufacturers are already driving toward that capability with the telematics products they’ve introduced in the last 12 months. For example, John Deere’s JD Link allows farmers to evaluate the fuel efficiency of a particular field operation by recording how much of the tractor’s available horsepower was used during a specific task. A farm manger can look at the data and decide if a smaller tractor might be able to perform that operation more efficiently next time.
“We’re going to have products come out of the woodwork that you wouldn’t even think of today, and they’ll be here in three to five years,” says Swain. “Agriculture will pull more non-agricultural technology into the industry.”
And you can’t talk about importing technologies from other sectors without discussing robotics, which are now widely used almost everywhere outside of agriculture.
“Once people start seeing that it (autonomous equipment operation) is working and the risks are not as great as originally thought, it will come fast,” Swain predicts.
AGCO used Agritechnica to unveil what may be agriculture’s first market-ready autonomous technology, called Guide Connect. Introduced on the company’s 900 Series Fendt tractors, it allows one operator to control two machines working in the same field.
Dubbed the “electronic draw bar,” Guide Connect doubles the productivity of one worker, putting two tractors under one individual’s control. That same two-tractors-one-driver idea was built into the Valtra ANTS concept tractor that AGCO unveiled about a year ago as part of a forward-looking design for the more distant future, which seems to confirm Swain’s belief new autonomous equipment options for farmers are about to start coming fast and furious.
One of the more subtle advances that farmers will see in the nearer term in precision agriculture is the move away from dedicated in-cab monitors. Swain believes they’ll be replaced by docking stations for generic tablets. “I think we’ll see more use of tablet computers running apps rather than have a terminal that runs a system in a vehicle” he says.
That too has already started. Bill Baker, president of Saskatoon-based Agtron, was at Agritechnica introducing his company’s seeding rate and blockage monitor system, which connects wirelessly to a standard smartphone using a dedicated app. “At this point we’re offering it for the Android phone,” Baker says. “Of course we’ll have it available (soon) for the iPhone as well.”
The Agtron system is expected to hit the market by the summer of 2012.
But whichever new technologies get launched in the near future, Swain thinks that for manufacturers, the need to remain flexible about what direction next-generation technology products will take will be key to staying on top of the market. “We (AGCO) have gotten ourselves into a position where we’re fairly flexible,” Swain says. “We don’t want to become the beta of beta and VHS.”
Building flexibility into a company’s telematics products makes it possible to follow changes in industry trends without forcing a major redesign of an established system, which in turn could force producers to learn entirely new operating procedures with each new machine purchased. “If we have to make a change, the impact on the customer is minimal,” Swain says. “If I change a system and the whole user interface changes, the farmer isn’t going to like it very much. But if I can make a minimal change and the learning curve is nothing, farmers aren’t going to care as long as it works.”
But with each manufacturer going their own way on telematics software design, is it likely there will be any sort of standard emerge, like ISOBUS, that will allow one company’s system to talk to another’s? “There will be some standardization,” says Swain. “But I think there’ll still be some proprietary aspects of it. I see companies not wanting to let a lot of CAN(BUS) messages out into the public domain. There’s going to be some aspects (of vehicle control) we don’t want the other companies to know.”
Griepentrog agrees. We’re still along way from moving seamlessly between the new technologies that the companies are test-driving today. As long as there is competition between brands, Griepentrog says, that problem isn’t likely to go away entirely. CG
