Boom arms stow to facilitate travel between fields and equipment storage. Instead, engineers had to consider how crops were planted in each geography and the distances between and within rows.įolded for easy storage. Still another challenge was how long to extend the booms, as adding another meter here or there wouldn’t necessarily provide a workable solution. They keep their chemicals centralized, so sprayers are brought to the depot for refills rather than taking chemicals out to the fields for refills as we do in the Americas.” Additionally, in some geographies plumbing carried liquids from the tank to nozzles through the arms, but in other locations, plumbing ran beneath the arms. Europe has further differences and much smaller farms. In North America, it’s more limited till with different farming practices and more regulation. “Not only do they use different folding patterns - there are 20 different ways to fold these systems depending on market and regulations - but farming conditions are also different. “During our first meeting, we spent three hours just discussing different features of sprayers in North and South America,” recalls Thomas Bartlett, Deere sprayer product engineering supervisor. To meet local regulations, we needed different functionality in things like durability and impact, which required translating metal specs into composite designs.” Those products were commercialized in 2017. Simultaneously, we started designing second-generation products for North America and Europe. “First, our joint team made some changes to improve reliability and durability for the South American market and launched those products in 2015. “We started with King Agro’s designs and recommendations, plus what Deere had developed, and found they were pretty applicable,” explains Phillip Ferree, King Agro general manager. Still, the market - particularly in the Americas - wanted longer booms. Eventually, steel booms reached a practical limit of approximately 36 meters (120 feet) side-to-side. In addition, many agricultural chemicals corrode metals, and longer booms require more elaborate folding mechanisms for boom stowage. (High fatigue loads are why booms never transitioned to aluminum.) In turn, longer booms with bigger support structures necessitated that farmers purchase larger tractors to carry heavier spraying equipment and larger tanks holding greater volumes of liquids however, in solving one problem, the heavier equipment leads to increased soil compaction and, as a result, reduced crop yields. Source | Deere & Coīooms have long been produced in steel, but as length has increased, larger support structures were required to keep arms from bending under torsional and fatigue loads and during unintended impacts with fences, trees and other structures. The limits of metal. Traditionally produced in steel, sprayer boom arms had reached their practical structural and width limits owing to the large support structures required to keep arms from bending under torsional and fatigue loads. After use, they refold and stow along tractor bodies to avoid tangling with fence posts and to permit farmers to drive on roads. In use, the boom arms unfold and extend perpendicular to the main axis of tractors and permit farmers to apply liquid chemicals (e.g., insecticides, herbicides and fertilizers) to crops. (Valencia, Spain), whose core business, ironically, was fabricating composite boat parts using aerospace-grade carbon fiber-reinforced plastic (CFRP), used its composites expertise in other markets to develop new sprayer boom arms for self-propelled spraying equipment. In response to this need, the Argentinian arm of King Marine S.A. This also reduces soil compaction, increasing productivity and crop yields. Automotive chassis components lighten up with compositesĪs contiguous agricultural fields in areas such as North America, Argentina and Brazil have grown larger thanks to consolidation, and as no-till farming increases in certain geographies, farmers want sprayer systems with longer boom arms to reduce the number of passes needed to cover increasingly larger fields.
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