Agronomic Design builds in resilience and flexible farming approaches
Read time: 4 minutes
Designing machinery that delivers the best yield with the fewest inputs also can support soil health, helping to protect crops from the increasing number of extreme weather events
“We must feed more people with less land and under increasingly difficult conditions,” is how CNH CEO Gerrit Marx has described the challenge of farming today. The Company is tackling this challenge by designing and manufacturing machinery that improves the yield of the land, as well as the quality of the crops.
The purpose of Agronomic Design, explains Darian Landolt, who leads the Agronomic Design and Research team at CNH, is to determine what a crop needs from agricultural equipment to optimally produce the best yield and quality output. “Our agronomists understand the underlying principles that we’re going to design proposed outcomes into each machine. We put that into the product definition right from the start,” he says.
With a Case IH 2000 series Early Riser planter, for example, the machine is designed to plant seeds at the right depth and spaced at the correct intervals. With a Case IH Axial-Flow combine, the machine incorporates flexibility in the size of crop residue it leaves behind, depending on how the farmer plans to prepare the field for the next crop after the harvest.
“That may be no-till seeding, for instance, which needs a different distribution and sizing of the residue than if the next pass will be with a large primary tillage tool in the fall,” says Landolt.
When we design machinery agronomically correctly from the beginning, the soil health features fall into place
Designed for resilience
The vital role of soil health has become far better understood over the past two decades, both for improving yields in a sustainable way and for the resilience of crops as extreme weather events become more frequent. Landolt started his career as a soil scientist and believes that good agronomic design can contribute to improved soil quality.
“When we design machinery agronomically correctly from the beginning, the soil health features fall into place,” he says, highlighting Case IH’s Nutri-Tiller tool for strip-tilling as an example.
Strip-tilling means prepping narrow strips of soil for planting so that around 40% of the crop residue is stripped from a field and 60% remains undisturbed. The armoring" benefits both the physical and biological health of the soil. The physical protection of the surface reduces raindrop induced erosion and regulates surface temperatures prior to canopy closure. This protection and lack of disturbance in turn allows the soil microbiology coupled with root exudates to continue rebuilding soil structure and interface with nutrient pools. This in turn allows for better infiltration of precipitation and nutrient availability therefore creating a more stable resilient farming system.
“We designed control of the residue managers so that only residue in the strips being tilled is moved and put on top of the 60%, so 100% of the residue is redistributed in the field, but it’s not buried where the seed is going to get planted, where it could cause a problem in the future,” explains Landolt.
Digital visualization of how the RoofX portable intelligence works.
Prioritizing flexibility
Case IH’s Soil Command technology also lets farmers make in-cab adjustments when they’re working in the field, depending on the soil conditions. It is used with the Case IH Ecolo-Tiger 875 primary tillage tool, which is designed for tillage from one edge of the field to the other. To improve drainage and alleviate compaction, it has five settings depending on the time of year and whether the area where it is being used has more or less moisture in the soil.
When used with the Case IH Tiger-Mate 255 field cultivator, which levels the soil above and below ground before the planter pass, Soil Command monitors the sweep position, the tool which picks up residue and resizes soil aggregates. The technology controls tractor speed to ensure that the surface and subsurface are optimized to create condition for best seed to soil contact and depth maintenance for early even emergence.
“That then makes the planter more effective,” says Landolt. “It allows for a high-efficiency planter operation so farmers can work faster without sacrificing precision, for instance.”
Case IH’s tillage and planting equipment is designed to work in all farming systems, from regenerative agriculture to sustainable intensification. With sustainable intensification, for example, the goal is optimal yield, and Case IH’s machinery is designed to achieve this using the most cost-effective quantity of inputs such as chemical fertilizers.
“We’re looking at synchronizing nutrients with crop growth, so with the planter we can apply nitrogen as a relay and place phosphorus in-furrow to ensure availability as the seeds emerge,” says Landolt. “Whereas in regenerative systems, you’re trying to get the soil to produce the microorganisms and the fungi and get everything to align to make those nutrients available for the plant. Our equipment can plant no-till, we can plant into a cover crop and we can plant into conventional tilth systems, all with the same planter.”
Farmers now have access to their historic and real-time agronomic data through the Case IH FieldOps™ mobile and web app, which can store data from their entire fleet of machines on a centralized platform. FieldOps can be used with the Case IH Pro 1200 display, a customizable 12-inch touchscreen, which empowers operators to make real-time, data-driven planting decisions from the cab. The platform gives farmers real-time access to machine metrics and remote viewing of the cab display from anywhere, so they can monitor and adjust tilling and planting methods from the office or on their phone.
The level of responsiveness and data-driven, real-time decision-making in Agronomic Design will only increase, adds Landolt:
“We’ll have the ability to change the machine on the fly or to change the next machine’s behavior because we’ve captured the output of the previous pass and we can alter it more readily.”
Ultimately, by connecting intelligent machinery with deep agronomic insight, CNH and Case IH are doing more than just simplifying fieldwork. They are equipping farmers to protect their soil, optimize every input, and build a more resilient food system for generations to come.
Case IH’s tillage and planting equipment is designed to work in all farming systems, from regenerative agriculture to sustainable intensification.
Digital visualization of how the RoofX portable intelligence works.
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