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Smart Potato Farming

Stand GE08, stand GE14

What awaits you in the Special 'Smart Potato Farming'?

The Special 'Smart Potato Farming' will be showing the variety of digital and technical innovations at different points throughout our exhibition. Firstly at our partners' stands - DKE-Data (agrirouter) stand GE08) and the Lower Saxony Chamber of Agriculture grass stand GE08, with two plots). 'Smart' technologies and services will additionally be presented at numerous exhibitor stands.

Stand GE08

In the joint tent at stand GE08, experts from our partner DKE-Data (agrirouter) and other technology companies will be waiting to field your questions about future technologies and will be discussing practical solutions to arable farming issues with you.

  • DKE-Data GmbH (agrirouter)
  • ASSW GmbH & Co. KG
  • Betriko GmbH
  • FarmBlick Oliver Martin
  • My Easy Farm SAS
  • Raven Europe B. V.
  • SAM Dimension GmbH

A demonstration field is located next to the joint stand. Panel discussions with demonstrations will be taking place here three times a day at 11.00 a.m., 1.00 p.m. and 3.00 p.m. Focus will be placed on two topics - potato harvesting without a driver and smart crop protection technologies.

Harvey.one, an autonomous machine designed for harvesting sensitive root crops, will be presented on one partial area. This involves a self-propelled, single-row harvester that navigates independently on the field using a combination of GPS information and optical sensors.

The machine concept is already being used to harvest seed potatoes and sweet potatoes and is continuously being evolved. As part of a research project, several units are being connected to form a robot swarm. In the future, the harvesters will communicate with each other and efficiently share harvesting tasks between themselves.

Smart crop protection technologies will be presented on the second partial area. Crop protection technology has evolved rapidly in recent years. Examples worth mentioning in this context include various sensor technologies, spot spraying or multiple nozzle carriers.

An arable farming problem that is occurring with increasing frequency due to climate change will also be shown: a winter wheat field with potato volunteers. Many potato farmers are aware of this problem from their own experience. They also know that the potato volunteers can still mutate into problematic weeds in the wheat stubble.

To put it clearly, there is still no solution to this problem as yet, but potential solutions that arouse curiosity will be presented and discussed. These include smart links between a drone and a crop protection sprayer in the form of an application map. The drone identifies and locates the potato plants that have emerged and passes on the position data of the individual plants to the crop protection sprayer. The sprayer is equipped with individual nozzle actuation, locates the potatoes and is able to treat them with pinpoint accuracy.

The first crop protection sprayers that can recognise and differentiate plants on their own have also been developed. This makes it possible to distinguish between crops and weeds while driving and also to treat them precisely. Both methods require a suitable herbicide, of course, whose future prospects are significantly improved by the new technologies.

Stand GE14

'Sustainable Potato Production with Smart Farming' will be the focus at the joint stand of the Lower Saxony Chamber of Agriculture, the Dethlingen Experimental Station and Saatguterzeugergemeinschaft in Niedersachsen e.V. (Lower Saxony Seed Producers Association). Potato-growing farms are facing enormous challenges. Society's demands on agriculture have changed, as has the business itself. The farms will have to adapt to the new conditions.

The use of plant protection products and fertilisers is to be reduced, areas are increasingly to be used for biotope and species protection. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to recruit workers.

New -digital- technologies and a deeper understanding of biological interrelationships are providing solutions to these requirements and need to be quickly introduced into farming. The entire production chain from variety selection, fertilisation and crop protection up to and including storage and marketing has to be analysed. The individual elements must be combined to establish a coherent overall system for potatoes as a foodstuff.

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