With the ability to lift up to 300 kilograms into the air, the Drones4Agro quadcopter drone on display in the Multi Tool Trac exhibit at Agritechnica was much larger than the average drone we see on farms today. But with that payload, it can also carry much more than the small camera that most drones... Read More
Category: Agritechnica
One of Agritechnica's two coveted gold medals was awarded to Kemper this year, for their Stalkbuster, which breaks up corn stubble, destroying overwintering habitat for corn borer. "In Canada and the U.S. you don't have a lot of corn borer problems because you have Bt corn," says Georg Wigger of Kemper, in the following TechTour... Read More
Finally, the answer to the What the heck is this? Facebook challenge. Inspired primarily by curiosity (and, dare we say confusion?), RealAgriculture's Shaun Haney and Jason Stroeve set up their equipment in Broch territory, at Agritechnica in Hanover, Germany. There, they spoke to Jose A. Lostal, about a machine many of us have likely never... Read More
Lawn mowing is a task that some people enjoy, but many would just as soon spend that time doing something else in summer. (Count me among the latter.) The technology for autonomous mowing machines that stay within a wire perimeter has been around for a while, and sales of electric Roomba-like grass-cutters have surged in... Read More
Vervaet's hydro-trike slurry spreader was developed in collaboration with contractors nearly twenty years ago. As its name suggests, it's a three- or five-wheeled, self-propelled machine, which offers up to 20,000 litres in capacity. And, even the five-wheeled option is built with soil health in mind. "So each wheel has its own track to minimize soil... Read More
AGCO's new generation of combine harvester made its first public appearance at Agritechnica in Germany last month. The result of the company's largest ever product development project, the graphite-coloured IDEAL combine will be sold under AGCO’s Challenger, Fendt and Massey Ferguson brands. "We started from a clean sheet of paper. It's a complete new combine...and... Read More
There are many ways to harvest crops, from pick-up to straight-cut headers. But, have you ever considered a stripper header? Designed largely for cereals, grass seed and rice farming, a stripper header has rotating teeth that lift the grain into the combine, essentially leaving everything else in the field. This has multiple potential benefits: The... Read More
Automation is not be the only innovative path the agricultural machinery world is headed down. Fendt unveiled an all-electric tractor — the e100 Vario — this fall, and had it on display at Agritechnica in Hanover, Germany. "We've removed the diesel engine and the diesel tank and have installed an electric motor with a 100kWh... Read More
A robot that zaps unwanted organisms with lasers may describe a character in a science fiction plot, but in reality, it's a technological response to farming with high labour costs. The Jäti is a battery-powered autonomous crawler built by a pair of German companies that is designed to identify weeds and destroy them with laser... Read More
We've read headlines about a future with robots in the field and witnessed the unveiling of a few self-driving prototypes at farm shows over the past few years, but there probably hasn't been a single event that collected as many of these concepts and products as Agritechnica in Hanover, Germany last week. The innovation in... Read More