Communication between tractors and implements has not always been easy.
-“Why don’t these two (fill with the brand and model of equipment) work together more easily?” has been one of the most common complaints among professionals who apply Precision Farming technologies to their agricultural machinery.
To meet this requirement for interoperability between tractors, combines and implements from different manufacturers, the ISOBUS protocol was conceived in the early 2000s.
Agroplanning’s new fleet management device takes advantage of this protocol together with communication through the CAN port to increase its capacities and performance in daily farming work.
Communication through the vehicle’s CAN port allows Agroplanning to monitor in real time and quantify parameters such as fuel consumption, engine RPM, oil temperature or vehicle’ s filters status. By including this data in our platform, we are able to generate actuable information such as the fuel consumption in a given task (with the consequent economic cost per task or plot), or in which areas the engine has required more power and therefore the vehicle is more prone to fatigue, in order to carry out real preventive maintenance of the machinery.
On the other hand, the connectivity to the ISOBUS port of the vehicle, allows Agroplanning to obtain and display in real time parameters on the implement which is working in a given task. Through connectivity to the electronics of the implement, Agroplanning shows the rate of product that is being applied at each point of the plot, and compares it with the rate prescribed for that point. In this way, an effective input application map is obtained, something that until now had been a challenge to obtain in a reliable manner, and which allows the quality of the application to be compared with that expected, and a record of these to be generated in the Agroplanning cloud platform.
In order to validate these promising functionalities, Agroplanning engineers have moved to the prestigious University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart (Germany), one of the reference centers in the implementation of the ISOBUS system.
There, together with the engineers and researchers of the Institute of Agricultural Techniques, the Agroplanning team implemented their solutions in the vehicles and implements that this department has available.
One of the proven characteristics was the compatibility of the system with vehicles of the leading brands (John Deere, Fendt and New Holland), obtaining data from implements (fertilizers and sprayers) of flagship brands such as Amazone and Rauch.
“With the current scaling up of agricultural input costs, the new version of Agroplanning with ISOBUS allows farmers to do a better job of managing agricultural inputs for maximum yield while minimizing the risk of inputs overapplication that could have a negative impact on the environment,” said Dr. Galibjon Sharipov of Hohenheim University.
According to Jacob Carballido, CEO of Agroplanning, “this new connectivity with Agroplanning’s ISOBUS will bring even more efficiency in the advanced management of agricultural fleets”. “We understand the importance for farmers of being more and more competitive, and we seek to generate more and more information and include it simply and effectively in the workflow of agricultural managers and technicians. There is no doubt that ISOBUS compatibility will allow us to give more time back to farmers, no matter what equipment they have, in real time and at a low cost.