FUTURE FARMING
“WE MUST CONSIDER NEW WAYS TO
INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY WITHOUT FARMERS SUFFERING
ON COST. OUR IDEA IS TO USE SMALLER, MODULAR
SYSTEMS WITH A HIGH DEGREE OF PROCESS
iVTInternational.com September 2019
21
it. Electri cation makes energy
easier to distribute on the vehicle or
from a tractor to an implement.”
A large, energy-producing
vehicle on a eld road could be
linked to a eld swarm by high-
AUTOMATION”
Professor Thomas Herlitzius, Technical University of Dresden
2020
The year fi eld tests
will begin using
a single vehicle
power cables like those used in John
Deere’s GridCON concept (see Is the
future electric? overleaf). “We want
to reduce the power-to-weight ratio
by a factor between two and four,”
says Tarasinski. “A 500kW tractor
be more di cult,” says Dr
Nicolai Tarasinski, manager of
advanced engineering at project
partner John Deere.
Tarasinski sees two alternative
routes to extending productivity
beyond the dimensional horizon of
current machines: using small,
modular units for versatility and
reduced soil compaction – or
divorcing machines from their
energy source.
“We can make machines more
powerful and productive but also
lighter if we split the energy source
from the machine which consumes
/iVTInternational.com
