The Canadian tractor market has maintained its strength according to the November 2017 Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) Flash report. One of the trends over the year has been the strength of the Canadian market in comparison to the U.S. numbers on a percentage basis. November total farm tractor sales in Canada were up 15.4… Read More
Author: Realag Machinery Insider
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
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
Regina-based ag equipment manufacturer Brandt Group of Companies has announced what it describes as a “major expansion into the U.S. market” with a deal to buy a 200,000 sq foot manufacturing facility in Illinois. Brandt is buying a plant and equipment at Bloomington-Normal from Kongskilde Industries, which was acquired by New Holland earlier this year. It’s… 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
A soil sensor that can detect compaction from above the ground in real-time is enabling a concept described as “variable depth tillage” for targeting compacted layers. The Topsoil Mapper made by Austria-based Geoprospectors is an example of a real-time sensor allowing farmers to account for variability as their tractor passes through a field, rather than… Read More