Introduction Direct energy expenses (diesel, gasoline, propane, electricity) total more than $1 billion annually for Iowa’s farmers. Day-to-day farm management techniques such as adjusting tractor gear and throttle settings or monitoring tractor tire inflation pressures can reduce diesel fuel consumption for row crop production. This study is being conducted over multiple years to measure the e...

Crop protection is mostly carried out spraying active chemical agents with potential impact on the health of environment, operator and consumer. Recently the European Commission played an important role in the protection of the operator with respect to the pesticide contamination during spray application. An active protection offered by tractor cab is a new requirement when the machine is used ...

OBJECTIVES Many childhood farm tractor injuries occur during the performance of work that was assigned by parents, and some tractor work is beyond the developmental capabilities of children. This has been highlighted recently by a policy statement authored by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The objective of this study was 1) to assess child development knowledge of farm parents who received...

Current commercial tractor guidance systems present to the driver information to perform agricultural tasks in the best way. This information generally includes a treated zones map referenced to the tractor's position. Unlike actual guidance systems where the tractor driver must mentally associate treated zone maps and the plot layout, this paper presents a guidance system that using Augmented ...

The ability to define in-field tractor load states offers the potential to better specify and characterize fuel consumption rate for various field operations. For the same field operation, the tractor experiences diverse load demands and corresponding fuel use rates as it maneuvers through straight passes, turns, suspended operation for adjustments, repair and maintenance, and biomass or other ...

In this paper we relate the Fefferman–Graham ambient metric construction for conformal manifolds to the approach to conformal geometry via the canonical Cartan connection. We show that from any ambient metric that satisfies a weakening of the usual normalisation condition, one can construct the conformal standard tractor bundle and the normal standard tractor connection, which are equivalent to...

Automatic control of agricultural vehicles has been a research goal for many years. Previous attempts have failed largely due to sensor limitations. With the advent of modern GPS receivers, a single low-cost sensor has been synthesized in which centimeter-level position and attitude measurements of the vehicle state are available using Carrier-Phase Differential Global Positioning System (CDGPS...

We propose several schemes to realize a tractor beam effect for ultracold atoms in the vicinity of a few-mode nanowaveguide. Atoms trapped near the waveguide are transported in a direction opposite to the guided mode propagation direction. We analyse three specific examples for ultracold (23)Na atoms trapped near a specific nanowaveguide (i.e. an optical nanofibre): (i) a conveyor belt-type tra...

In a ®eld trial (1985±1996) on a sandy loam soil the effects of tractor traf®c and fertilisation on earthworm populations were investigated. The tractor traf®c treatments compared normal farm practice (`normal') with reduced tractor traf®c (`low'). In the fertilisation treatments, three different cattle-manure management methods were compared. The cattle manure was applied as diluted slurry, as...

There is a well known one–parameter family of left invariant CR structures on SU(2) ∼= S. We show how purely algebraic methods can be used to explicitly compute the canonical Cartan connections associated to these structures and their curvatures. We also obtain explicit descriptions of tractor bundles and tractor connections.