VDMA 'landtechnik' representing the German agricultural machinery industry held its annual technical working committee meeting in Frankfurt, inviting several contributions from European partners. 

 A good mix was displayed in terms of topics starting  with the implementation and impact of new legislation. On braking systems there were presentations from France and Switzerland on hydraulic versus pneumatic. France would allow single line hydraulic systems to exist on interchangeable towed equipment after 2022 but only with design speed under or equal to 25 km/h. An analysis in Switzerland revealed the large presence of hydraulic systems in the current fleet and the somewhat lower presence of these systems in vehicles used by contractors and proposed to allow only pneumatic systems for heavy trailers driving with design speed of 40 km/h.

On possible new legislation, the need of ethical guidelines for autonomous vehicles was touched upon. In the automotive sector, such guideline already exist. On standardisation, international standards are still the preferred option but regional conditions must be taken into account to incorporate the growing complexity. The decision to have the CEN consultant informed after the standard is ready was not seen as an improvement to the past situation when consultants where involved earlier in the drafting process. 

On digitisation there was input from DKE on agrirouter and from the German farmers’ association on a Code of conduct on data sharing in agriculture calling for an easy and simplified approach. The VDMA guidelines were presented to help German companies to integrate digitisation and the future with 5G looked brighter than ever with a presentation from 5G LABS. The Claas telematics systems for communication tractor to car was explained with the basis being HERE’s ‘Open Location Platform’ . Here is driving a industry standard that could become mainstream to be picked up by the Map& traffic Provider platforms like Garmin, Tomtom, etc. The principles are brought to AEF for further discussion. It is linked to the activities ongoing in ETSI (European telecom standardisation Institute), partly initiated by CEMA and executed by AEF.

AEF itself had two presentations. One was calling for more responsibility of companies to provide the necessary data to the AEF data base, which AEF will continue to improve by making it simpler and more user friendly. The second presentation focussed on the next generation of tools to allow wireless in field communication (WIC) and seamless data flow from machines to farm management systems and cloud systems with EFDI (extended FMIS data interchange). EFDI was presented as the next generation of agricultural data exchange format. For WIC many boundary conditions still need to be met and the choice of radio equipment is not clear. First deployment would be expected by 2021.

On CO2 the progress in the project EKOtech was presented. A new interesting term was used: ‘qualified efficiencies’. The Ekotech project focusses on efficiency gains over the whole process of grain production. But simply taking the sum of all efficiency gains of the smart tools used will not work.  The efficiency of each machine/sensor in a specific operation needs to be ‘qualified’ in the interaction with other tools in order to quantify/predict the overall gains. 

Last but not least the VDMA steering committee ‘Agricultural Machinery’ expressed their support to CEMA and AEF activities, while highlighting Digital Farming remains one of their main focus areas.