Ways to automate a plough have graced these pages before and surely will again. This, though, is the first system to use ISObus control … Straight rows
Some say that it doesn’t matter to a seed whether the furrow was straight or bent. But it does matter to someone who takes pride in their work, or is ploughing at right angles to a road! Someone like Heiner Müller, an arable farmer and potato grower near Cologne. Like anyone faced with rapidly changing soil in a given field, he struggled to keep work straight thanks to the constant change in side load on the plough. Pride aside, this mattered because subsequently his GPS-guided tractor and potato planter had a hard time producing straight baulks. The obvious first step — trying to plough with tractor auto steer operating — stumbled, as it was bound to do. So his next move was to find a way to guide the plough by GPS, and that led to Mechan Groep — importer of Fendt, Valtra and Massey for the Netherlands, and supplier of machine control systems to extend those brands.
