Club of bologna proceedings

Hans-Hasso BERTRAM 
Currently we get 70 to 80% of our money from 
the government, but as you know our 
government changed some weeks ago, and we 
don’t know what will happen in the future. So 
all the other points are the same as Dr. 
Liberatori told you already. The manufacturer 
has to pay nearly 20-25% of the real cost of the 
test at the moment, and we get the rest of the 
money from the government. That’s in answer to 
the financial question. And now to answer the 
question from the UK: about 20% of the 
machines don’t get a positive results - a positive 
report. In these cases the machine can sent back 
to the manufacturer, he changes some details 
and submits it again. He does not have to pay 
the full price of the test and then start again. 
And normally he gets a positive result in the 
end. But of all the machines which come in for 
testing, only 20% leave our test station exactly 
as they arrived, so most of them are changed in 
details. 
The other question was about combine 
harvesters, the test codes for combine 
harvesters. In Germany we have an industrial 
group like UNACOMA which is discussing test 
codes for combine harvesters at the moment. We 
will change them or modify them, and we are 
working in close connection with CEMAGREF 
in France on this job. The third part of your 
question was about different testing conditions, 
especially for soil preparation and so on. We 
have the same differences in our country, you 
know. We have light soils, and we have heavy 
soils. Our proposal is that the test conditions 
should be defined more clearly than they have 
been up to now. So we have to cover most of the 
conditions in our country, although not those 
which are very special in some details. It’s the 
same I think for our partners. But we have to 
describe the testing conditions as precisely as 
possible, so that you can compare whether they 
are similar to those in your country or not. We 
have the same problem with mineral spreaders. 
There are different types of minerals, in terms of 
calibration and so on, and we have to define 
this as exactly as possible, so that you can 
compare it with your conditions and see if these 
test results are applicable to conditions in your 
country or not. 
Finally, as regards the reaction from the 
industry, I would say it has been positive up to 
now.