FARGO, N.D. – The ISOBUS 11783 criteria intended to standardize electronic communications among agricultural implements has been around for a while, but it seems some manufacturers try harder than others to make it work for farmers.
The latest air drill from the Horsch Anderson company in Andover, South Dakota, is one of those implements designed to break down the electronic barriers.
Jeremy Hughes says ISOBUS is a common electronic language for communications between a tractor and the implement.
“Until now, they’ve all had such tight proprietary systems. Green only talks to green. Red only talks to red, and so forth,” said Hughes, the Horsch Anderson sales manager. He said none of the majors wanted full compatibility.
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“The best comparison I can think of is Pioneer couplers. Think back 25 years when you had a bucket full of hydraulic adapters to make your implements work.
“Finally the industry agreed to a common coupler. But then we went down that same road again with electronics, starting in the early 1990s. Everything became proprietary and once again the farmer was the big loser in the deal.”
Hughes said that in the air drill industry, some companies developed proprietary systems for variable rate and mapping technology. This was an additional hurdle for farmers wanting to use the new tool.
“We take the opposite approach,” Hughes said.
“We don’t want to be proprietary. We want to be as open as possible. Farmers have already spent tens of thousands of dollars buying their hardware and they’ve already got it on their tractor.
“We don’t think they should be forced to spend another $5,000 for a monitor so they can run their drill. That makes no sense. That’s why we strive to achieve full compatibility.”
Hughes said his company’s special electronic sophistication comes from Agtron in Saskatoon.
“They’ve built us a system that’s compatible with all virtual terminals from all major manufacturers on the market. This is one of the highest compatibility systems available anywhere.
“All the majors have their virtual terminals. Case. John Deere. Agco. But their marketing strategy has been quite different from a short-line manufacturer like Horsch Anderson.
“The majors don’t want farmers to know we can plug and play with their systems. Right now we’ve proven we can plug and play with the Case Pro 600, John Deere GreenStar, IntellView from New Holland and GTA from Agco.”
However, the degree to which they can monitor and manipulate general drill functions such as calibrations, seed sensors, variable rate and drill size depends on how the virtual terminal is set up. He said most of them do not fully meet the ISOBUS 11783 standard.
“There’s only one monitor out there right now that can do four reads, and that’s the Agco GTA. It’s the only monitor that’s 100 percent ISOBUS compliant (as of Sept. 11, 2008). It can do 11 functions if you can think of that many needs.
“That’s the monitor we use as a benchmark to test all other monitors. Deere and Case will hopefully follow soon.”
Hughes thinks there’s still a lot of foot dragging in the industry. He knows the capability is already designed into every virtual terminal but it hasn’t been opened up to the farming community yet.
“For Case New Holland, right now we’ve tested zero variable rate functions. The simple reason is that they haven’t yet opened up any part of that terminal for variable rating. We can run the basic operations of the drill. That’s no problem. But they haven’t offered the ISOBUS standard for variable rating.
“Right now for John Deere, the level of compatibility is one product for variable rating. With our Agtron system, we can choose which single product we want to work with.”
The Horsch Anderson 500 bushel cart has three compartments, plus many customers also pull an anhydrous cart. With the Deere system, the customer can choose only one of those four products for variable rate.
Hughes said all Horsch Anderson carts manufactured for 2009 will have the full ISOBUS 11783 compliant control system.
“It will be standard on all our drills for 2009. Our 500 bushel cart will be labelled as a 500I. That means it’s an ISOBUS 11783 cart.”
For more information, call Jeremy Hughes at 605-298-5663 or visit www.horschanderson.com.
