A Helping Farm Hand from Space
Gone are the days when farmers rumbled over the fields in a rickety tractor. Agriculture is betting on modern technology too: for greater environmental protection and increased productivity.
Ulrich Widmer works in agriculture – but he is not a farmer. The correct job description is "technical agricultural contractor". As a service provider, Widmer operates over 40 combine harvesters, sugar beet harvesters and tractors and employs a permanent staff of 18 to serve the surrounding farms. We first encounter him behind the wheel of a 200 HP tractor, spreading fertilizer on a recently harvested barley field. What you notice is that Widmer isn't holding the steering wheel. The machine moves across the field as if controlled by a phantom. "The satellite navigation system is doing the steering," he calmly explains.
The high-tech approach to digging furrows
The system is called "Auto-Guide" and is produced by agricultural machinery manufacturer AGCO-Fendt. Satellite navigation and autopilot enable tractors to plough precisely parallel rows – to a level of accuracy of two centimeters. "With the track guidance system, for example, we were able to save 10 to 15 percent in working time and fuel," says Munich-based Professor Hermann Auernhammer, referring to the benefits technology can offer in crop cultivation. It is a win-win situation – economically as well as ecologically. The buzzword is "precision farming“. But Auto-Guide is not the only technology that is revolutionizing modern agriculture. It is even possible to take account of variations within a field. To do so, farmers use different types of sensors, measure soil properties, determine the crop yield, and then interpret the data on the PC using agricultural software. The proportion of farmers using this modern technology is still very small, however agriculture expects expect a genuine boom in the coming years.
Metal farm hands
Osnabruck Technical College is already one step closer to the future. If it were up to Arno Ruckelshausen, a professor of engineering and computer science, soon farmers will not be alone in ensuring a good harvest: "We are currently working on robots that, in just a few years, will be able to perform specific tasks on the fields autonomously." Although the robots need to be prepared for the difficulties that working in the fields can pose, Ruckelshausen is clear about the objectives: "I think that in five to ten years we will have robots, such as weeding robots, that will be able to work under specific, tightly defined conditions." People who imagine pale farmers who only sit in front of computer screen would be incorrect, however. "Farmers will still be sitting on a tractor in 10, 20, even 50 years from now. I'm absolutely certain of it," says Auernhammer. So, even in the future, we will still have people like Ulrich Widmer in his muddy boots, using his modern fleet of machines to meet our society's growing need for raw agricultural produce.
You can find out more about the use of high-tech machinery in agriculture, for example what lasers have to do with chlorophyll, in the latest print version of Best Practice.
