Workshop 

In 2006, the community of agricultural engineering in Europe formulated for the very first time a common vision about agriculture and the driving engineering technologies. The Agricultural Engineering and Technologies (AET) was established as an initiative of private companies and academics in the European Manufuture Technology Platform. The VDI is an active member and supporter of the initiative AET. The activities of AET led to a number of research areas, which were presented as an implementation plan for the EU Commission as a basis for calls for tenders and were used as a basis for research calls in FP7 and Horizon 2020. Primarily, issues were selected that could be reconciled with the EU's research strategy. In the area of agricultural technology, this mainly involved topics from automation, robotization, precision farming and information and communication technologies. Themes such as efficiency initiative - sustainable agriculture, safe workplace 2025 / future AgHMIs, topics to sustainable animal production and topics to bioenergy and renewable materials were less well received in the EU calls for tenders. As a future task of the Manufuture AET, one can therefore infer that the strategies of the EU Commission and the future visions of the branch of agricultural technology have to be more harmonized. As a result of the activities of AET and VDI we present the Strategic Research Agenda for Agricultural Engineering “Agriculture Technology 2030”. The trends and research topics are preceded by a general view on developments in agriculture. Agricultural technology developments must always be seen as developments for agriculture, especially when introducing new assistance systems and communication technologies, the farmer must be more involved in certain development phases.  


On behalf of MANUFUTURE AET 
 Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Pickel