Club of bologna proceedings

Johann SCHROTTMAIER 
Austria 
I think one great advantage of our agreement, I 
say this as one of the partners of this agreement, 
is the political dimension with agenda 2000 in 
Europe. You know we now have standardisation 
of safety and so on, and we will get new regula-
tions in environmental standards. And these en-
vironmental standards are also part of our te-
sting of these machines. These standards will be 
very important in future, to get machines for 
implementing agricultural best practice on our 
farms. There will also be some money flowing 
from the European commission to the countries 
and farmers to work with this best practice a-
griculture.
 
Hans-Hasso BERTRAM 
I will first answer the question from Prof. Auer-
nhammer, about the electronic details on the 
machines. We have already tested one electric-
driven precision drill in a performance test, and 
we agree with Prof. Auernhammer that it is ne-
cessary to use some special conditions to test 
what I would call the “black box” on these ma-
chines. Because in the second year of working 
with this machine we found that some faults had 
occurred in practice, and the test had already 
finished. So in our special group for testing 
conditions we are now discussing special tests 
for these parts of machines. So in future we will 
have special tests for these parts of the machine. 
The second question was from professor Heege: 
we try to have common rules, and maybe there 
are some differences in detail, but before testing 
a group of machines we present these testing 
conditions to the industry involved, and discuss 
it with them, and so we hope to have common 
rules.
The next point, which I think is important too, is 
that before accepting a test report from another 
country we have the chance to look at the re-
sults, and if we don’t agree we are not forced to 
accept these results, we can refuse them. So it’s 
not possible in this case for a manufacturer to 
use the test results in this country - if we refuse.