Seeding Agriculture 4.0: How Sensors Ensure More Precision in the Field
A farmhouse with a barn. A few chickens are scratching in the yard. The cows are milked by hand twice a day. A lonely tractor chugs across the fields. And the adjacent forest is managed by the farmer with his logging horse Toni. This idyllic picture of farming hardly exists today. The consumer market is tough, the challenges are becoming ever greater, and many an old farm has evolved into a highly efficient agricultural business.
The industry has also caught up enormously in terms of digitalization over the past ten years. In addition to wheat, corn and soybeans, more and more farmers are harvesting something else: data. About the health of their piglets. About the milk yield of each individual cow. About the condition of the soil. And about the minimum fertilizer use for maximum crop quality. The nuclei for all this information
More comfort for long harvest days
To be honest, we at Continental are no livestock professionals. But our experts are very familiarwith the sensors used in agricultural applications. “With sensors, we can, among other things, make the analog air springs of undercarriages, cabs, and seats of agricultural machines ‘smart’ – and thus significantly increase comfort for the driver,” explains Carsten Klages, Off-Highway expert at Continental and marketing executive for air springs in industrial applications. One example is the air springs for the front axle of tractors, for which Continental is the sole supplier. When these sensors are combined with other components, for example valves and other actuators, as well as the appropriate control software, they are the first step towards
Agriculture 4.0. One concrete example of this is the Electronic Air Spring Damping system (eASD), an electronically controlled suspension and damping system for vehicle cabs that automatically adapts to uneven ground conditions, thus increasing future comfort for all those who spend twelve hours or more at the wheel of a harvesting machine during harvesting season.
