Club of bologna proceedings

Egil BERGE 
Norway 
I highly appreciate Mr. Chamen’s clear 
overview of soil compaction and its problems, 
and especially in moist climates like western 
and northern Europe this is a big problem. 
But we see also that the gantry system, 
although it has many good possibilities, is felt 
by farmers to have a certain lack of flexibility 
- especially if the fields are small, irregular or 

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hilly - because it’s not easy to come along the 
road from one field to another one with such 
a system. Prof. Heege noted that the 
experience so far is that making high capacity 
equipment also increases the weight. In my 
opinion this is not a universal physical law. 
Have we looked for a better solution, for 
achieving higher capacity without increasing 
the weight? I think if we put this as a 
requirement to the designer he will do it, but 
so far they haven’t even tried - in many cases. 
We have only just started trying: we are 
constructing using more aluminium, which 
has only one third of the modulus of elasticity, 
but then you can change the section to get the 
same stiffness. There are a lot of possibilities 
there, but there are also a lot of possibilities 
in using more wheels, as well as a different 
type of traction - driven rather than pulled. 
 
Tim CHAMEN
Two of the things that have just been 
commented on: I think automation of 
processes within agriculture could address the 
problem of weight, because conventional 
work rates then go out of the window. This is 
because you can work perhaps 24 hours a 
day, and therefore you can have lighter 
vehicles working more slowly but for much 
longer periods, and have several working in 
unison. On the point of gantries being 
inflexible, I think that until one has seen the 
vehicles in reality, one doesn’t appreciate that 
in fact small awkward shaped fields are 
actually much easier to operate with a gantry 
system than with a tractor. Because all 
operations are precisely marked out by the 
vehicle, and if you’re using a 12-metre wide 
sprayer as a part of your production system , 
for example, then the 12-metre wide gantry is 
going to be just as easy to use. And it travels 
lengthways down the road, steered at both 
ends, with sophisticated control systems, 
which actually makes it very easy to move 
around the farm.