SIMA 2017, the Paris International Agribusiness Show that will be held Feb. 26 – Mar. 2, also announced several “Special Mention” awards as part of the Innovation Award program to farm equipment manufacturers who introduced new innovations in the past year. 

The award winners were selected by a panel of 25 experts from France, and headed up by Jean-Marc Bournigal, chairman of the French National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture.

Special Mention: John Deere ExactApply Intelligent Nozzle Body

For spraying equipment, speed, pressure and flow are traditionally related, forcing operators to work within limited ranges. With the Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) principle, You can have optimal spray quality without matching pressure to flow rate. With the PWM system, the pump maintains constant pressure (chosen by the operator) and the flow rate is controlled by the nozzle bodies. Flow, speed, and pressure can be adjusted independently.

The nozzle bodies control the flow rate by creating micro-cuts (beats). Ultra-rapid cutoffs (up to 30 times per second) and the alternating function of the nozzle bodies provide spraying with consistent droplet size and no skips. The John Deere ExactApply system uses this technology to provide unprecedented ranges of application. Operators can work at constant pressure on a 1-3 speed/flow rate range: from 10-30 kph at constant dose or from 100-300 L/ha at constant speed.

Conversely, pressure can be lowered (parcel exterior) or raised (parcel interior) to limit the risk of peripheral drift. By individually controlling each nozzle head, the automatic cutoff by GPS is now done by each nozzle head (2-4% less coverage), and in a curve (up to 25% discrepancy), the system adjusts the flow-rate of each nozzle head to maintain a constant dose across the entire width. The nozzle body consists of two solenoids with a pulse capacity of 15Hz each, and a rotating cylinder. This exclusive design provides the option of working in combined mode (frequency of up to 30 Hz) or independent mode: each solenoid controls a different nozzle head, to spray according to circumstances and automatically with one, the other or both nozzle heads.

Special Mention: Sencrop Real-Time Farming Weather Platform

Sencrop is designed for farmers and offers them a real-time application linked to farming weather stations and sensors located in their fields to help them improve organization and decide when to take action on a daily basis using accurate, ultra-local data. This farming weather service can be connected to decision aiding tools (DAT). This approach overcomes differences encountered when using weather forecast services based on a small number of sensors which, as a result, do not provide suitable information for the condition of the area observed.

In particular, the Sencrop application can upload farming weather data in real-time 24 hours a day, analyze reliable data (automatic detection of deviation and customer validation in the event of marked differences from well known laboratories) to improve agronomic models and make the most of advice given to farmers, track operating conditions in fields, create simple alerts (accumulated rainfall, low volume, etc.) and do so such a way that information can be shared, improves decision making about what action to take: spraying, irrigation, sowing, etc., and supplies agronomic models with reliable, retrievable and ultra-local farming weather data. The idea is to be able to see field information at a glance, share it and also target spraying advice and help direct farm work for local conditions.

Easy to use: a single button on the sensor to switch it on and a very ergonomic graphic interface (mobile and PC). A highly autonomous “Plug-&-Play” solution. The farming weather stations, which can be transported if you want to change the field they are in during or at the end of the season, are connected via low speed, long range networks.

Special Mention: SMAG/Smart Agriculture Application for the Internet of Things for Agriculture (IoTA)

Faced with the growing number of connected objects on the farm and their associated applications (weather stations, traps, camera, tracker, flow meter, hive, etc.), SMAG has created the first mobile application for centralized management of all objects present on the farm.

This innovative application, which is unique on the agricultural market, offers 3 functions: geolocalization of all of the objects, consultation of their associated data (targeted weather, proliferation of pests, soil quality, etc.) and automatic recovery of field data from Agreo and Atland web solutions (surface area, type of crop, field name, etc.). Finally, combining these 2 sources of information generates intelligent alerts for each object to feed high performance decision aiding tools. Ultimately, thanks to IoTA, farmers will be able to take the right decision at the right time and reduce risks in their fields. This project was developed in partnership with the companies CAP2020 and WEENAT and marks the launch of a unique ecosystem in IoT in farming.

Special Mention: TeeJet Technologies’ DynaJet Flex 7140 — Flow Variation System Without Pressure Variation

In the systems currently available on the market, known as DPAE (flow rate proportional to the advance), spraying pressure is linked to the speed of advance. When the speed increases, the pressure in the nozzle increases much more quickly (the pressure varies with the square of the flow rate), very fine droplets form and a risk of drift arises, particularly in windy conditions.

When this happens, spraying quality becomes very poor as the droplets become too small and tend not to adhere to the target; reducing speed will have equally negative effects due to an increase in droplet size and a reduction in the impact rate per cm. The DynaJet Flex 7140 system provides strict control of droplet size thanks to Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) technology that dissociates spraying pressure and the nozzle flow rate, and dissociates the operating pressure, droplet size and application dose. This system can be installed on any sprayer with a flow rate controller, regardless of the type of regulator and on new or retrofitted equipment.

E-ChemSaver. electric solenoids are installed on each nozzle body in the place of the anti-drip mechanisms. The solenoids operate at a constant frequency of 20 hertz. The system automatically adjusts the duty cycle to maintain a constant pressure and therefore a constant droplet size matching the size programmed in the cabin by the operator. The pressure at the nozzle outlet is constant, the droplet size is regular and the quality of spraying, fully controlled.

In addition, the DynaJet controller incorporates a nozzle database for which all of the droplet size characteristics are correlated to information on the various possible operating pressures.