HANNOVER, Germany — One of the world’s largest agricultural brands is focusing on providing precision tools with its products.
Case IH president Andreas Klauser told a meeting in Hannover last month that the company is planning rapid moves to greater automation.
Mathew Foster, with the company’s European agriculture segment, said Case is planning to accommodate greater use of technology.
“Today we are looking for single-machine management: guidance, application control, yield monitoring, machine control for implements. Today we are looking at telematics and data management,” he said.
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“The future is automation and autonomation.”
He said farmers are starting to consider using telematics to manage farms rather than just fields, such as driverless equipment and intelligent automation.
He said the company is working with farmers to find ways to do this “safely and efficiently, especially when it comes to repetitive tasks.”
Guidance technology has helped producers reduce input costs and operator fatigue, but Foster said they are also now looking at path optimization to reduce machine use and field compaction.
Yield monitoring, while still not fully adopted, is “not just yield from a field, but (can be used) to understand variability of a field and take action to reduce it,” he said.
Application and section control in the company’s AFS unit has been refined to provide low-cost RTK coverage over England, Northern Ireland, Demark and Germany as low as 2.5 centimetres.
“Farmers tell us they are getting five to 10 percent reduction on inputs, six to 12 on fuel, 15 percent more yield and one to two hours per day per operator,” said Foster.
Those sorts of savings will prompt producers to invest in new equipment and tools, he added.
“And it helps our customers to improve their sustainability and reduce C02 use and wasted inputs and the environmental cost of those.”
Case IH has trained 2,000 European farmers in the last year to use its precision agriculture equipment.
The company employs nine specialized educators and has had 2,750 downloads of its app for training producers to use AFS to its greatest effect.
