With its expertise in digitisation, Austrian agricultural machinery manufacturer Pöttinger offers numerous ways to make everyday work easier, more efficient and convenient.
Austrian farmer Gerhard Forster is a Pöttinger customer who runs a successful organic farming business with 95ha of arable land. The business’ main focus is the production of threshed crops such as spelt, emmer and einkorn wheat, as well as lentils. It also grow pumpkins to produce seed oil. An Aerosem 4002 ADD pneumatic seed drill with the Seed Complete package in combination with a Lion 403 power harrow has been in operation on the farm since early 2020.
In addition to the electric metering drive, the heart of the system is the CCI 1200 terminal with Seed Complete. This contains intelligent smart farming solutions, including a communication unit. It enables the use of variable rate control (the seed rate is precisely adjusted to site-specific soil conditions using application maps previously created on the PC) and section control (the metering system switches on and off automatically at the headland). The system can also exchange data and communicate with the Agrirouter data exchange platform and Next Farming field indexing software. Using cloud-based platforms, all machine data generated during sowing can be precisely recorded and viewed later for evaluation and documentation purposes.
“The CCI 1200 opens up a lot of opportunities,” Mr Forster said. “All my ISObus machines can be operated using one control terminal. By communicating with Agrirouter, the machine data from all of my machines – regardless of manufacturer – can be transmitted to Next Machine Management and Next Farming. I can immediately find all the data I need for documenting my operations. Information on fertiliser and sowing rates is always available and can be traced seamlessly, even over a period of years.”
Documentation is easy to create and save intuitively. Jobs are created at the control terminal before work begins and then processed directly. As soon as the job is finished, the collated data is transferred to Next Machine Management using the mobile data network. This is done by setting up a WLAN hotspot on a smartphone.
The seed drill technology delivered an impressive performance even in difficult operating conditions in autumn 2020.
“The dual-disc coulters on the Aerosem did a great job,” Mr Forster added. “Despite the difficult conditions, all our autumn sowing jobs were completed by the end of November. This year I had the opportunity to do some contract work with the seed drill because it works so well in our region, even in the most adverse conditions.”
He is also very satisfied with the section control system. The IDS distributor head in conjunction with the automatic switching system allows the working width to be adjusted by the metre, which makes for a serious saving on resources. In order to increase output even further, he intends to manage his whole farm on a site-specific basis in future. He has already laid the foundation stone with this latest Pöttinger seed drill technology.
