PHOTO: KAIYU GUAN, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PHOTOS: JOHN DEERE
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John Deere develops corded electric tractor that runs on the grid
NORTH AMERICA BY BAS VAN HATTUM
A clever construction with a winding/unwind- ing extension cord has made this possible. The tractor was shown a few months back to a select company in the US. European John Deere employees do not want to (and can not) confirm anything, but insist it is definitely not an April Fool’s joke. The official announcement of this prototype is planned for early 2019. Details of this corded tractor have not yet been made public, but the system would be able to deliver 300 kW of power. A 150 kW (200 hp) electric motor drives the wheels; an additional 200 kW (272 hp) electric motor takes care of the power tools. According to the first website that reported on this tractor, John Deere aims to raise its efforts
J
Reducing fertiliser usage by 40%
EUROPE Using satellite imagery, Swedish start-up Vultus claims to be able to reduce leaching of nitrogen from fertilisers to the environment by 40%. Vultus uses satellite imagery to identify various conditions and different nutrient needs, to pro- vide farmers with an up-to-date analysis and easy-to-follow nitrogen recommendations. According to the company, 60% of nitrogen fer- tilisers are wasted because they are not applied at the right moment and in the correct dosage. This leads to unhealthy crops and environmen- tal problems. The excess of nitrogen fertiliser also emits nitrous oxide, which in Sweden alone is the cause of 7% of greenhouse gas emissions (CO2
equivalent).
The system will start on 5.5 million
6
ohn Deere recently presented an au- tonomous electric tractor. The 400 hp machine gets it’s power from the elec- tricity grid, not from a battery pack.
to develop fully electric tractors. Provided the electricity is generated in a sustainable man- ner, this would be the fastest route to a CO2
-neutral agriculture. That the prototype is
completely autonomous, doesn’t come as a surprise. It has been known for years that be- hind the scenes John Deere has been working on a robot tractor. The fact that it lacks a cabin is a real sign. It is the first real hint that tractor drivers will slowly disappear in the near future.
Started in 2014 John Deere started this corded tractor project in 2014. In 2017 a lot of construction was going on. In early 2018 the project team presented the findings to a consortium of universities, government officials and participating compa- nies, to see if the project should receive further financing for development. “With the comple- tion of the project, we now have a fully electric, fully autonomous tractor that can run without any cab,” says Philipp Lehmann, developer at
John Deere’s Enterprise Electric Drive Services Group. This department is concerned only with electrically powering (parts of) machines and wheels. “The idea is to improve the power to weight ratio of the tractor and to reduce ma- chine costs. To do that, we have removed all superfluous tractor components, such as the cab, the diesel engine and all attachments belonging to the engine (fuel tank, filters). John Deere is said to already have follow-up plans in motion. For example, this concept would be perfectly suitable for working in so- called ‘swarms’, where several tractors on one plot carry out the work as a team. This electric, autonomous tractor is the umpteenth alterna- tive concept in a row. The forerunner is John Deere’s ‘Sesam’ (tractor with a large battery pack) from 2015 and the so-called Multifuel tractor from 2013. The Sesam also runs 100% on electricity, but the battery capacity (108 kWh) is limited: after four hours work, the tractor has to charge for three hours.
hectares and is estimated to save about 2.3 mil- lion tons of CO2
, comparable to the amount re-
leased during 258,000 car trips from Sweden to South Africa. Vultus has calculated that for a typical farmer, these up-to-date satellite recom- mendations could save up to 40% of fertiliser, whilst increasing yields and crop quality. For a medium sized Swedish farm (250 hectares) the system could save approximately €15,000 per year, says the company.
Short wave IR tells maize from soy
NORTH AMERICA Scientists of the University of Illinois have de- veloped a technique to distinguish maize and soybean fields on satellite images using short wave infrared data (SWIR) and the processing power of supercomputers. Previously, national maize and soybean acreages were only made available to the public four to six months after harvest. The lag meant policy decisions were
▶ FUTURE FARMING | 25 May 2018
based on stale data. The new technique can distinguish the two major crops with 95% ac- curacy by the end of July for each field – just two or three months after planting and well before harvest. It turns out maize and soybean have predictably different leaf water status by July most years. SWIR and other spectral data from three Landsat satellites were analysed over a 15-year period, and consistently this leaf water status signal was picked up. The researchers used a type of machine-learn- ing, known as a deep neural network, or deep learning to analyse the data and focused their analysis within Champaign County, Illinois, as a
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