New Holland is one of the top selling machinery manufacturers for agriculture, providing tractors, combine harvesters, balers, ploughs and tillage equipment, among others in Europe. GNSS guidance systems correspond nowadays to essential equipment offered with New Holland’s agricultural vehicles, as they allow farmers to improve the performance of their different tasks. In this sense, EGNOS is the basic GNSS correction solution, enhancing at no cost the accuracy provided by GPS alone. For this reason, EGNOS is currently included by default in all the GNSS guidance devices commercialized, along with the farming vehicles, by New Holland.
In order to see first-hand how EGNOS works with New Holland’s agricultural machinery, we visited the “Campus New Holland” located in Segovia (Spain). It is the only training centre that New Holland has in Europe, offering a wide variety of tractors and other machinery to be tested over a large field. During the tests, we could experience how EGNOS can be smoothly configured through the tractor’s guidance display and applied to assist the farmer’s driving along the defined guidance pattern. EGNOS can even be employed with the New Holland’s hydraulic autosteering solution, avoiding manual driving errors and reducing the farmer’s fatigue.
In relation with farmers contacting New Holland support about EGNOS, “farmers contact New Holland mainly to get information about its performance in field and to require technical support when having problems with the EGNOS signal”, comments Alfonso Majadas, responsible of Final Customer Training Support in New Holland Ibérica. In order to be able to assist New Holland’s dealers and customers in EGNOS, “all support teams are registered in the EGNOS User Support Website to consult EGNOS data and receive notifications related to current issues, such as outages or PRN changes”, reports Isabel González, responsible of Marketing and Business Development for Precision Land Management in New Holland Ibérica. From their experience, Isabel and Alfonso confirm that EGNOS is especially useful for “those agricultural activities that do not require very high accuracy. We are talking, for instance, about tilling and spreading of cereal crops”.