From the 17th to the 19th of September the AEF European Plugfest took place in Antibes, France at the very new Juan-les-Pins Conference Centre. With support from our French host, Axema, the event had record attendance. 161 attendees tested products in the well-established format which consisted of “speed dating” for ISOBUS ECUs. Also 90 visitors attended, in total, 61 companies were represented.

In addition to the Plugfest event, project team meetings and the AEF General Assembly, the AEF Conference event took place in the afternoon of Wednesday the 18th of September. There were over 50 attendees listening to the four different presentations followed by an interesting panel discussion with all the presenters at the end of the afternoon.

The picture shows all presenters from the left: Peter van der Vlugt, Dr. Michael Sharpe, Antonio Kung, Michelle Wetterwald, Jim Wilson, Claire d’Esclercs and Norbert Schlingmann.

The AEF is looking for a project team lead to help with an EU subsidized design project. The benefits of digital farming are increasing day by day and the importance of getting all the data in one place to aid decision making is the ultimate goal for the agriculture industry, i.e. farmers, dealers and manufacturers. The AEF is now looking outside “the field” to investigate how “machine to cloud” and even “cloud to cloud” communications can be standardized to enable the benefits of digital farming to be realized. If this opportunity is of interest to you please see more details see the offer of employment.

Once again the AEF was present at Union Station in St Louis, Missouri participating in the 2019 edition of InfoAg. As with previous years the AEF shared a booth space with AgGateway. With over 1200 attendees registered for the three day event there was a lot of foot traffic in the trade show area.

Starting in January 2020 the annual fee that manufacturers pay to access the AEF ISOBUS Conformance Test will increase to 24.300 Euro for the Flat-Rate-License, 10.800 Euro for the Single-License and 3.400 Euro for the Multi-License. The Conformance Test was first made available to manufacturers in 2012 for an annual fee which has never increased! However, in the last seven years, the Conformance Test has been evolving, testing for new functionalities, for example TIM, has been added, as well as the continual maintenance that is necessary for any software product.

TIM (Tractor Implement Management) is a cross-product and cross-manufacturer ISOBUS solution where the implement controls certain tractor functions and optimizes the working process. What is new is that the implement sends information to the tractor via standardized and secure communication which leads to an optimization of the overall system. With TIM, the farmer works more precisely, effectively and economically while simultaneously increasing quality. TIM saves time and money. Field operations become technically simpler and more convenient as TIM takes over tiring tasks.

During the last week of June, in one of the hottest weeks of the summer, the Steering Committee, Team Leaders and associated deputies converged on Lauingen, Germany for four days of meetings at the Deutz Fahr Arena, just over the road from their new factory.

The first AEF Service Council took place in Warendorf at the end of December 2018. Due to the positive outcome, the participants expressed the wish to repeat the event.

Parker Hannifin is a Fortune 250 global leader in motion and control technologies. For more than 100 years the company has engineered the success of its customers in a wide range of diversified industrial and aerospace markets. Learn more at www.parker.com or @parkerhannifin.

We are a technology company that builds connectivity solutions for machines. We provide the infrastructure to connect mobile machines with the cloud (IoT), with each other locally (M2M) and with humans (HMI). Leading OEMs in the off-highway industry utilize our CAN technology to connect their machines and roll out digital services. Proemion will be present at Agritechnica 2019 with an exhibition stand in hall 15, H41.