Better Farming - November 2016

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50 FarmNews First > Better Farming November 2016
Congratulations, Dale!
Better Farming writer Dale Cowan has been
awarded the International Certified Crop
Adviser’s ADVISER OF THE YEAR award.
The award recognizes a certified crop adviser who delivers exceptional
customer service, is highly innovative, has shown leadership in their
field, and has contributed substantially to the exchange of ideas and the
transfer of agronomic knowledge within the industry.
Better Farming readers benefit from Dale’s regular advice and insight in
his popular YIELD MATTER$ column, and he is expanding his focus in
the magazine to include weather analysis.
Dale is also a senior agronomist and sales manager with AGRIS and
Wanstead. In addition to advising large growers, he mentors 14 CCAs.
Well done and congrats, Dale. We salute you on this honour!
HOWIT WORKS
are giving rise to the use of drone
systems that can perhaps help to
decrease the need for the traditional
physical crop scouting to find stunted
or discolored plants. These drone
maps permit the zeroing in for
specific soil testing needs or other
crop suppressing issues.
Can driverless tractors or
combines be far away from use?
Cars not only have backup cameras
and proximity sensors, but some are
capable of parallel parking themselves
on command. Some cars are also able
to sense frontal proximity to other
vehicles and slow down or “set” the
brakes for faster response.
It has been reported that a young
inventor, Matt Reimer, from near
Killarney, Manitoba has operated a
tractor remotely by using his laptop
computer! Fortunately or unfortu-
nately, the system cannot yet be used
legally without an operator on board.
Jordan Wallace of GPS Ontario
showed me a video of a working
remote-control system operating a
carrot cart alongside a carrot harvest-
er in the Holland Marsh. Both units
were following the predetermined
path set out by the GPS. Since both
units had to be operated simultane-
ously, they had to be circled back and
could only work one way across the
carrot field. (The carrots had been
planted sequentially across the field
and thus the harvestable carrots were
only along one side.) By contrast,
given the high storage capacity of
combines, there is only an intermit-
tent need for a grain buggy to pull
alongside when the combine grain
tank is almost full.
In addition to the summer an-
nouncements of Case IH and New
Holland, other equipment manufac-
turers have made notable achieve-
ments in the area of autonomous
tractors. Fendt, a brand of the AGCO
Corporation, won a gold medal at the
Agritechnica in 2011 for its Guide-
Connect - which enables two
Like the little Ford
tractor, my log/log slide rule
carries a lot of sentimental value.
This desktop and other pocket-sized
calculators are still very handy for
many simple tasks.