iGreen: A ubiquitous dynamic network to enable manufacturer independent data exchange in future precision farming

In order to master the future challenges concerning increased demand for food and energy it is obvious that new methods are needed to boost productivity in a sustainable way. One key aspect to optimize agricultural processes and decision making is to derive effective means to acquire and share information along the value chain. In the past, data management in agriculture was dominated by proprietary, mostly Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) driven solutions with limited scope. To overcome the shortcomings associated with this, the German national joint research project iGreen was initiated in 2009 to enable convenient and efficient data sharing in a holistic and OEM independent way. As a project partner, John Deere focused on developing concepts and components for interconnecting machines among each other and with infrastructure nodes. In this paper the achieved results such as the infrastructure component referred to as the machine connector, the onboard data management and integration of mobile devices will be presented and evaluated through experiments focusing on data sharing in wheat and forage harvesting. The overall promising results indicate that in the future new applications focusing on optimizing processes can be enabled that will greatly improve the effectiveness and ease of agricultural production, especially fleet management and resource planning.