Fuse is AGCO’s approach to precision agriculture that connects the entire crop cycle from enterprise planning to planting, crop care, harvesting and grain storage — providing mixed-fleet farming operations improved access to their farm data to make more informed business decisions, resulting in enhanced productivity and profitability, AGCO said.
 |
| Andy Beck, senior vice-president of AGCO. |
“In new products, we’re trying to maintain a high level of engineering and R&D expense in order to make sure that the cycle of new products that are coming out continue to be very robust,” Andy Beck, senior vice-president of AGCO, said during an Aug. 9 presentation at the Jeffries Industrials Conference in New York. “We’re investing in products outside of the tractor, our core tractor markets, also in the area of harvesting application equipment, and also investing a lot in new technologies or the term precision agriculture. And that is a very important trend in our business and we think an opportunity for future growth and differentiation amongst competitors. And so, we have a lot of investment in new technology as well around that area.”
Central to this strategy is AGCO’s collaboration model: joining forces with other providers and organizations in the agriculture industry to deliver quick to market tools to improve farming operations, AGCO said.
Through partnerships and connections with farm management software providers, AGCO is allowing more growers to more easily transfer data between AGCO machines and their preferred Farm Management Information Software(FMIS) using AGCO task file management systems, VarioDoc and TaskDoc, to help them become more efficient in farm data and fleet management, the company said. Some of the recently established data connections that AGCO has made include connecting with farm management tools from SMAG, Farmplan, DuPont Pioneer and FarmFacts, enabling growers to make the most of the data on their farms.
- AGCO’s partnership with software provider, SMAG, enables easier task data transfer with SMAG FMIS tools, Agreo and Atland.
- Growers now may choose to have their data that is collected through VarioDoc and TaskDoc wirelessly transferred to MapShots, Inc. AgStudio software or DuPont Pioneer EncircaSM services.
- A recent collaboration with Farmplan enables direct connection to its GateKeeper FMIS, providing a simpler process to receive completed ISO XML task data documentation with the applied plot data. VarioDoc and TaskDoc, via Bluetooth and the task data exchange server integration, allow for the export of farm setup data.
- FarmFacts, a subsidiary of BayWa AG, has launched a cloud-based farm data management solution called “Next Farming.” By integrating with AGCO’s VarioDoc and TaskDoc products, Next Farming will enable customers to seamlessly exchange task data including prescriptions and yield maps.
In collaboration with other industry participants, AGCO is helping shape the direction of AgGateway’s Ag Data Application Programming Toolkit (ADAPT) project, is a founding member of the recently announced Agricultural Data Coalition (ADC), and plays a key role in the launch of a groundbreaking new industry tool called the Ag Data Transparency Evaluator. The company also is involved in the newly announced DKE data hub.
- ADAPT is a set of software tools designed to simplify task file exchange between different farm software and hardware applications, including farm equipment.
- The mission of the ADC is to help farmers better control and manage their electronic data and promote innovation and progress in the agriculture marketplace.
- The Ag Data Transparency Evaluator tool analyzes contract terms and conditions that allow producers to quickly and easily determine the answers to concerns that many have about their farm data.
- AGCO is currently working with other leaders in the agriculture industry in the development of the DKE platform which will help solve data communication and conversion problems for growers.
