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Plugfest helps ensure farm equipment compatibility

Engineers from many farm equipment manufacturers will be making sure modern implements work with different brands of tractors.  Ryan Milligan is with the Agricultural Industry Electronics Foundation. He tells Brownfield, “This is an international conglomerate of equipment manufacturers that have come together to make interoperability between tractors and implements of different brands compatible.”

Milligan says the engineers, programmers, and developers from competing companies get together twice a year to test equipment and make sure the red, green, blue and other machines can work together. “We have something called ISOBUS conformance testing that allows these equipment manufacturers to take a conformance test within our equipment and make sure that they’re following the data protocols and connectivity protocols for this ISOBUS standard. This allows enables a lot of the precision ag functionalities.”

Milligan says the association was founded in 2008, and they immediately knew the interoperability issue had to be tackled.  He says there are now more than 12-hundred pieces of machinery from large and small manufacturers that are certified ISOBUS and using the same type of connections.  Milligan says manufacturers are already working on new standards and connection tools to meet the data and video demands of new, cutting-edge machinery. The next Plugfest is next week in conjunction with the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM) meetings in Milwaukee. 

AUDIO: Ryan Milligan discusses Plugfest and machinery interoperability with Brownfield’s Larry Lee.