CNH offering XPower electro-weeding through AGEXTEND, while Germany’s Crop.Zone takes the technology one step further with conductive-enhancing solutions and strategic global partners.

Today’s agricultural tires resemble their predecessors in that they are still round and mainly made of rubber. Maintaining a tread and staying inflated may have been enough for years, but modern tire design parameters accounting for soil compaction, improved traction, tread wear, sidewall strength at super-low inflation rates and, increasingly, environmental concerns have permanently changed the way farm equipment engages the soil.

Recent research from Italy shows adding a flaming process to roller/crimper termination in standing cover crops can improve plant desiccation and green matter control over mechanical means alone.

It’s a summer of testing and experimentation across a broad area of Russian farmland. This season major players in the nation’s agricultural industry are field-testing harvest automation based on combines equipped with artificial intelligence and on-board monitors.

While satellite imaging of farm land and unmanned aerial surveillance of crops capture most of the attention in remote sensing, a young analytics firm and Valley Irrigation have been collaborating over the last couple of years to bring crop monitoring a little closer to the ground with sensors mounted on center pivot sprinklers.

Interconnected tire sensors and on-board artificial intelligence processors promise on-the-fly changes to tire pressure and tread conformation depending upon soil and traction conditions.

Machine vision and artificial intelligence are developing hand-in-hand with efforts to reduce weed pressure by forcing weeds into patches of concentration where they are more likely to be controlled.

British researcher reports progress in improving aluminum/air battery technology that could boost energy density of automotive and heavy equipment EV battery packs.

Mainstream on-farm autonomous machinery gained a lot of ground in 2019, particularly if you consider a prototype New-Holland natural-gas-fueled driverless tractor got prime billing at the New York Stock Exchange over the Labor Day weekend.