ATLANTA, Ga. – Chad Yagow beams when he looks around the Atlanta meeting room that is filled with North American agricultural engineers.
“These annual awards celebrate their skill and creativity, their ability to meet the challenges of food production for a hungry planet and for the modern farmer,” said Yagow, who is a combine engineer for John Deere.
Yagow has chaired the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers’ annual winter meetings for two years.
This year’s event in Atlanta, Georgia, ends his role and another engineer will take over.
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The highlight of the event is the prestigious AE50 Awards that are handed out for what the society’s judges deem to be the most important innovations to come to market in the past year.
Officials from corporations as large as Agco and Deere, along with small mom and pop engineering shops, wear the winners’ ribbons proudly on their name tags for up to five days as the engineering event stretches into a large farm equipment show, Agonist, and the American Farm Bureau convention.
The top 50 innovations market their wins on the giant trade show floor with high-flying balloons that hover over the exhibit halls.
“The AE50 is an important part of the industry,” Yagow said.
“Its judging and its outcomes are scrutinized by our fellow engineers and agriculture as a whole. Agriculture is a dynamic sector of engineering and its importance to everyday life is realized quite quickly once you see what your work accomplishes is the greater society.”
Canadian companies have won many of these awards in the past, including prairie companies like MacDon, Schulte, Seed Hawk and Seedmaster, but none were included this year.
“This is a highlight of the industry,” said ASABE executive director Darrin Drollinger.
“This year especially we are seeing a lot leading edge equipment developments. There is money in agriculture right now and it shows up in the (research and development) budgets and inevitably in new products coming to market.”
The awards, which were handed out Jan. 6, included a few that might interest prairie farmers.
Case IH picked up one for its latest flexible combine header and New Holland won for a new approach to combine wind management on sloping terrain.
Bobcat of North Dakota received one for its latest skid steer loaders.
Dickey-john’s new rapid grain moisture meter was a winner along with Raven’s cellular based RTK guidance system.
Automation and precision agriculture made its presence known at the awards, winning 20 of the 50 plaques.
Engineer Lorne Pollard, who heads off-road equipment at Prairie Engineering in Naperville, Illinois, said the business is changing with more electronic and automation work.
“But as we get better at doing bigger and faster, we still have to work out the materials and processes to handle it all. There is a lot innovation needed all around the sector. These awards recognize that big picture.”
Winners that serve western Canadian farmers include:
• Claas America for its telematic system that monitors, tracks and delivers live machinery data to farm offices for management and to dealers for service. The company also won for its Disco 3900TC centre pivot mower and conditioner with an offset hitch, its Maxflo 1200 draper combine header and Terratrac track system that replaced the Mobiltrac combine tracks, its new 7 series of Lexion combines and its Orbis 635 row header.
• Case IH’s 3020 Terraflex flexible cutterbar, combine auger header won for its high capacity, innovative rubber mounts and broken feeder finger retention.
• TheBobcatMseriesS850andT870 cab forward skid steer loaders received awards for their ergonomics and efficiency.
• Dickey-john’s GAC 2500 moisture tester rapid grain tester for grain elevators and larger farm applications got the nod for its speed.
• The GVM Agriwave web-based telematics system is a leader in comprehensive machinery management and provides on-line maintenance feeds to dealers.
• Deere won for telematics, precision farming systems monitoring, a tractor and round baler combination that automatically stops the tractor to finish and tie bales and a new active steering system that improves the ease and safety of steering on its latest tractors.
• Optifan from New Holland manages airflow across the sieves when fore and aft angles become a problem for machines as they climb and descend hills. The system automatically increases and decreases fan speed to push through dense layers of material or to help retain grain being accelerated out of the machine due to gravitational forces related to slope operations.
• Raven won for its Slingshot connectivity to RTK feeds via mobile networks.
Look for a compete list of AE50 winners on producer. com/crops. Some of these winners’ machines have been profiled inThe Western Producerin the past months. Others will be appearing in the coming weeks.
