Club of bologna proceedings

 
Uri M. PEIPER
Israel 
I would to add a comment on the gantry issue. 
There are a few people in this room who have 
worked on the gantry systems, and the main 
question is: why didn’t this machine actually 
take off on a commercial basis? I think one of 
the answers is that, although it’s fairly easy to 
use a gantry system for tillage operations or 
even for some other operations in the field 
like spraying, there are many other operations 
for which the adoption of the gantry system is 
not as easy. If you remember during one of 
the lectures we had last year, one of my 
comments there was that it is fairly difficult to 
protect the field from compaction where we 
as agricultural engineers always say “all 
right, don’t go on the field with a high-
pressure inflated tyres like in trucks”. The 
speaker’s answer was that “well, there are no 
trucks on the field”, and there was one slide 
showing a truck hauling some product out of 
the field! So the gantry system is a very nice 
approach. There was one Israeli company 
that was trying to promote it, but it never 

---

 
87
really caught on. I wonder why can’t we try to 
have more comprehensive look at the whole 
gantry system, and how at the moment it is 
not really catching on. 
 
Theodor FRIEDRICH 
I have two comments: the first one connects 
directly to the discussion on the gantry, and 
also to the comment Prof. Singh made, about 
the large weight machines and the economies 
of scale. I believe that if we go into systems 
with reduced tillage - ideally zero tillage, 
under these systems we would have to till only 
to decompact the soil to repair the 
compaction done by heavy machinery, and I 
think the economy of scale discussion could 
take on a completely new aspect. That would 
probably lead us, also from the economic side, 
to identify maximum sizes of machines which 
are economically feasible, when we add the 
cost of tillage to the large scale machinery 
operations. And that would perhaps also be a 
new horizon for the gantry technique. The 
question asked was why it didn’t catch on: 
well it has so far been tried under traditional, 
conventional tillage systems. Maybe under 
zero tillage systems, where compaction is the 
real problem, gantry could have a complete 
new horizon. Second comment: Prof. Heege 
mentioned the problem that we can’t really 
foresee the weather, and I don’t believe really 
that meteorology will make such great steps 
that we will have a reliable weather forecast. 
So my approach would be to make 
agricultural farming systems more risk 
tolerant. One relevant indication was given in 
the paper by Prof. Cavazza, saying that the 
infiltration under no-till soils is ten times 
higher than under tilled soils. And that is also 
what we find, for example in tropical 
countries - in Brazil - where there’s a large 
history of zero tillage, and it can be seen that 
infiltration there is so high that farmers are 
doing away with terraces on sloping lands, 
because they don’t need them anymore. 
It has certainly also a short term impact on 
farmers and on the risk of farming. During 
the past two years we have received reports 
from the no-till association in Brazil, saying 
“God bless the Niño effect, because these 
catastrophic droughts and rainfalls are really 
boosting our attractiveness”, because the 
farmers using zero tillage were much less 
affected by drought or by heavy rainfall than 
the other farmers. And farmers in difficult 
weather conditions are now looking more into 
reduced tillage systems.