Beyond seed and soil: Farmers' high-tech tools increase productivity

Technology has combined with factors such as seed science and advances in herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers, changing American agriculture dramatically during the past 50 years. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farm output rose by an average of 1.76 percent every year between 1948 and 2002, even as labor declined by an average of 2.4 percent per year in the same period.

Esmond farmer Paul Taylor said he believes that the most dynamic thing to happen to farming in the last 50 years has been the increase in horsepower.

“We've just got so much more capacity now,” he said. “Grandpa probably started with a two-row planter behind two horses, planting a six-row pass at 2-

3 mph. I suppose if they did 15 acres per day, they were doing pretty good. Now we're planting 60 feet wide, and we like to average 250 acres per day. It's totally changed the productivity of labor.”

And some features that probably looked like bells and whistles when they first appeared on tractors - such as air conditioning, strong headlights and enclosed cabs - have allowed modern farmers to work even longer hours than their historic counterparts, he said.

Just as Jones is confident that ultrasounds help him to get more money per animal for his cattle, he's a big believer in the tools he uses to farm 3,600 acres of corn and soybeans. His tractor is outfitted with an autosteer system, a computer that uses a GPS signal to keep field rows evenly spaced at the end point where the tractor turns around.

The tractor's onboard computer also monitors seed spacing, how many seeds are falling into each hole, and the pressure the planter is exerting on the soil as it makes a trench.

“As seed costs have gone up, you want every seed to be fully maximized,” he said.

Most farmers also do a variety of mapping in their fields. They can take the data gathered by computers on field equipment and create color-coded maps that show which areas have the best yields and differences between those areas and lower-yield spots. Those differences include soil topography, nutrients, type or amount of fertilizer applied, and the type of seed planted.

“People are surprised to find out we split the farm up in different segments and don't just apply the same nutrients and seed over the whole thing,” Taylor said. “Those maps may look like pretty colors and mosaics, but the computer actually reads all that, and as the tractor goes over the field, it applies the nutrients based on need.”

Taylor and Jones estimate that such automated equipment increases efficiency by about 5-10 percent. That may not sound like much, Jones said, until one starts adding up $4-per-gallon diesel fuel or $200-per-bag seed.

After bull run, Rajkot machine tool units fear setback

Faced with spiralling raw material prices and high energy costs, the Rs.7-billion Rajkot machine tool industry seems to be heading for a downswing after the last five years’ bullish growth run.

Since 2003, the region began emerging as one of the top machine tool manufacturing centres after Bangalore, leaving Ludhiana and Pune behind. During this time, its production increased threefold.

Rajkot-made machine tools are now exported to Russia, the UK, the Gulf and Africa.

However, this dominance could soon be history.

Raw material prices, especially that of steel, has gone up about 40 percent, said Shaileshbhai Kawa, president of the Rajkot Machine Tools Manufacturers’ Association (RMTMA).

In addition to steel, the price of castings was also going up, he added.

‘As a result, we don’t think we can achieve a turnover of Rs.1200 crore (Rs.12 billion) by 2010,’ he told IANS.

The machine tool industry in Gujarat has undergone substantial changes in recent years. The industry is now producing the latest range of competitive customised solutions, including CNC (computer numerical control) machines.

The industry has spruced up productivity by adopting CNC machine tool technology. For this, local manufacturers teamed up with the Indian Machine Tool Manufacturers’ Association, the central government and the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (Unido).

Rajkot houses around 200 machine tool manufacturing units. ‘There had been a sharp growth in the machine tool industry as a whole and Rajkot had benefited the most from it,’ said Rupesh Mehta, the former president of the RMTMA.

The Rajkot machine tool industry was hit badly in 2002 when India’s the engineering sector faced a recession. Nearly 200 units shut down operations and the annual turnover of the industry plummeted from Rs.2.5 billion to Rs.1 billion during that time.

The situation turned worse following the entry of computerised tools from Taiwan and China. But the cluster development approach in collaboration with the Unido helped the industry do a turnaround.

What to watch for during a virtual machine’s life cycle

Creation: Enterprise-class configuration of the server and applications, mostly done manually through the virtual-machine manager interface. Automated image-capture of physical machines is starting to take root with such niche vendors as Transitive, particularly in the area of emulating non-x86 processors and running them on other processors, making it possible, for example, to manage Solaris and Windows.

Visibility: Machines set up for a specific purpose - for example, testing or development - can linger without administrators' knowledge. Hyper9's Virtual Infrastructure Search and Analytics tool, a Google-like search engine offering basic discovery and state inspection of virtual machines, will be free for download in September. For application visibility, Tideway Systems' Foundation maps application relationships to the physical and virtual servers.

Load balancing: Virtual machines must move around and change their purpose as needed to handle predictable and on-demand loads. Most organizations do this manually using native VMware ESX, Citrix Systems XenSource and Microsoft Hyper-V controls. Niche products, such as FastScale Technology's FastScale Composer Suite and Evidant's EvidantSP software suite, also are starting to get attention.

Machines in production: Managing live machines is done manually by using native virtual-machine interfaces, but more tools are starting to enable the cross-platform management of some of all of these features on a pick-and-choose basis. Novell's ZENworks, for example, includes asset-, configuration- and patch-management components. Life-cycle points during production include licensing; access controls; patch-, configuration- and change-management; security (settings, default services and ports, antimalware, firewalls and so forth); service-level thresholds for physical machines, virtual machines and applications; and allocation.

Jtekt to Set Up Machine Tool Sales Firm in India

Japanese machine tool maker Jtekt Corp. <6473> said Monday that it will establish a sales and after-sale service joint venture in Gurgaon, India, by the end of this month.

The new company, Toyoda Micromatic Machinery India Ltd., will be capitalized at 24.8 million rupees, of which Jtekt will provide 75.5 pct and Micromatic Grinding Technologies, India's largest grinding machine maker, the rest.

The new firm will be Jtekt's first subsidiary in India.

Nagoya-based Jtekt airms to win orders worth about 7 billion yen in the growing Indian market in 2010 by promoting user-oriented sales, it said.

So far, Jtekt has supplied machine tools mainly to Japanese automakers including Suzuki Motor Corp. <7269>. The firm aims to expand its client base to Indian auto manufactures and wind power companies, company officials said.