{"id":5213,"date":"2011-11-11T13:07:40","date_gmt":"2011-11-11T15:07:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/2011\/11\/11\/maquina-versatil-2\/"},"modified":"2015-12-15T14:39:30","modified_gmt":"2015-12-15T16:39:30","slug":"maquina-versatil-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/maquina-versatil-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Versatile machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"068-071_CortadordeCana_189\"<\/a>An innovative proposal for the planting and cutting of sugarcane, the objective of which is to increase productivity in the field and reduce costs, is being developed at the National Laboratory of Bioethanol Science and Technology (CTBE) in Campinas, in inner-state S\u00e3o Paulo. This is a machine called a controlled traffic structure. It can carry out all the mechanized operations of the sugarcane farming cycle. The equipment manages to reach steep areas that today\u2019s harvesters cannot.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe mechanized harvesting operation as it is currently done basically uses the same technology as 50 years ago, which was developed in Australia,\u201d says Professor Oscar Braunbeck, from the School of Agricultural Engineering (Feagri) at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), coordinator of the controlled traffic farming program. One of the advantages of the new machinery, currently being tested in a laboratory that imitates the field conditions of a sugarcane plantation, is reducing traffic on the planted area and as a result soil compression, which is prejudicial to the growth of the plants in subsequent years.<\/p>\n

While the controlled traffic farming machine has a gauge (distance between the wheels) of 9 meters, current harvesters have a gauge of between 1.6 and 2.4 meters. Because of this and their weight, they only manage to harvest one row of sugarcane at a time and cause compression of around 60% of the soil\u2019s surface, which ends up harming the development of the crop. \u201cCompression encourages erosion and makes it difficult for water to penetrate the soil,\u201d says Braunbeck. The 40% of the land where current machinery is unable to go is the preserved area, on which sugarcane can be produced. \u201cWith a wider gauge the preserved area for planting would reach 87%,\u201d is the comparison Braunbeck makes. \u201cBy reducing heavy traffic in sugar plantations we provide the opportunity for planting cane directly, as is done with cereals.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first version of the equipment was designed to adapt to the structure of current mechanization. So it was made in an articulated way, with traction and steering on all four wheels, arms that withdraw for road transport and harvesting heads that are positioned to cut six lines of cane, two at a time. It will be driven by an automatic pilot with GPS, which will be supervised by an operator.<\/p>\n

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Edson Silva \/ Folhapress<\/span>Harvesting system using the current machinery results in heavy traffic on sugar plantationsEdson Silva \/ Folhapress<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Steep ground<\/strong>
\nThe new machine will be able to go on to steeper ground. \u201cBecause the first version of the equipment we are developing is wider, it remains stable in places where the gradient is as great as 19%,\u201d says Braunbeck. Today\u2019s harvesters manage to go on land with a gradient no greater than 12%. \u201cAbove this, because they are narrow, they overturn fairly easily,\u201d says the agricultural engineer Guilherme Ribeiro Gray, a former student at Feagri and one of the partners in Agricef, a company that is involved in the project.<\/p>\n

Founded in 2005, until 2008 the company was housed in the Unicamp incubator, Incamp. Agricef has already had three projects approved under FAPESP\u2019s Innovative Research in Small Companies (Pipe) type of funding, and since 2009 it has been participating in the CTBE project, in which it is responsible for the development of the harvesting module.<\/p>\n

Braunbeck emphasizes that there has been no evolution in the sugarcane agricultural management system with the changes that have occurred in environmental, economic and social demands. Harvesting, for example, although it has undergone a great advance with the gradual prohibition of burning cane straw manually, still uses machinery developed in the 1950s in Australia. \u201cThe machines for harvesting cane have only undergone a few adaptations since they were first designed, while the harvesting of cereals has advanced a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is right to focus on cereals. The area planted with cereals in the world is around 700 million hectares, while sugarcane occupies just 22 million hectares. \u201cThe loss during mechanical harvesting in sugar plantations today is around 10%,\u201d says Gray. For comparison purposes, the loss in harvesting grain is around 1.5%. \u201cTo reduce damage in sugar plantations we\u2019re proposing a principle that is different from the current one.\u201d Instead of a harvester with a divider to separate the rows on the plantation, which results in tangling and a loss of cane, the basis of the proposed operation is to fix the cane in the machine to then cut it at its base, draw it in and move it by traction to the upper part, where it will be chopped up into small pieces and transferred to the trailer, a vehicle used for transporting the cane. \u201cThe separator that is on the sides of the equipment is synchronized with the speed at which the machine is moving,\u201d says Gray. It raises the culm (stem) so the chain or moving-belt pulling mechanism can collect the cane. The idea is to handle the cane as little as possible before it is cut to reduce damage to the ratoon root system, which remains in the ground to regrow , and losses in the field.<\/p>\n

Once the small cut up pieces of cane have been transferred to the trailer, the project proposes to load part of the straw onto it while the rest will remain as ground cover on the plantation. This cover will help reduce the temperature of the soil, control weeds and diminish water evaporation. Now, in most cases, all the straw is thrown onto the soil, because as its density is very low the cost of transport ends up being high. The proposal is for the straw to \u201chitch a ride\u201d with the chopped up small pieces of cane so that it settles into the cracks between the cane. The main partner of the new machine project is Jacto, an agricultural machinery and electric vehicle industry headquartered in Pompeia, in inner-state S\u00e3o Paulo, with support from the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) in the amount of R$ 16 million. Within four years the equipment must be tested and functioning and the partner company has a further two years to make the product ready for sale.<\/p>\n

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CTBE<\/span>Electronic model of the new machine, with a distance between the axles of 9 metersCTBE<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Sustainable management<\/strong>
\nThe direct planting of cane, which takes place without plowing the soil, is one of the aspects of the project. \u201cThis is sustainable management, because every time the soil is plowed there is a loss, which will have an impact over the years,\u201d says Braunbeck. The idea is that the machine opens up furrows in predefined places, where the sugarcane points will be evenly deposited in the correct amounts. Currently, the machines distribute them irregularly. \u201cDistribution is very bad and more than 50% of the cuttings die because of competition among themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CTBE also has a project for exploring precision farming to increase productivity and reduce fertilizer costs and environmental impact. The objective is to personalize soil management. Sensors will be developed in sugar plantations for measuring soil or plant properties. With information from the sensors, as the machinery moves around it would start treating the soil with the necessary inputs. An area of 100 hectares at the Pedra Mill in Serrana, in S\u00e3o Paulo State, is being used for trials. Other partners are the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), Valtra, a manufacturer of tractors from Mogi das Cruzes, in S\u00e3o Paulo State, Paulista State University (Unesp) at Jaboticabal, Higher School of Agriculture \u201cLuiz de Queiroz\u201d of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP) and Unicamp.<\/p>\n

The studies that resulted in the agricultural machinery project started in the 1990s and extended over the subsequent years, when Braunbeck, with support from FAPESP, carried out basic research into the cutting and cleaning of sugarcane. Subsequently, other studies dealing with aspects of mechanized harvesting were carried out by Agricef\u2019s partners, with guidance from Braunbeck. \u201cAll this knowledge formed the basis for the current project,\u201d says the professor. In his assessment, the change from manual harvesting to mechanical has been very fast considering that sugarcane has been grown in Brazil for the last 500 years.<\/p>\n

In the State of S\u00e3o Paulo, the main producer of Brazilian sugarcane , an agreement signed in 2007 between producers, mills and the government, called the Agro-environmental Protocol, determined the elimination of the burning of straw by 2014 in mechanized areas and by 2017 in all sugarcane-growing areas. In the rest of the country, the environmental legislation allows the burning of straw in sugar plantations until 2020.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy converting from manual to mechanized harvesting there is a two-fold environmental gain,\u201d says the researcher Marcelo Valadares Galdos, from the CTBE\u2019s Sustainability Program, which is carrying out a full carbon audit of sugarcane ethanol in Brazil, a study carried out in partnership with Esalq. \u201cOn the one hand, when cane waste stops being burned we stop sending carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but there are also other gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect and they are even more powerful, like nitrous oxide,\u201d says Galdos.<\/p>\n

The second gain is that by leaving the straw in the field, when it decomposes it ends up being incorporated into the land and there is an increase in the stock of carbon in the soil, which is very important for the ecosystem. \u201cWe\u2019ve identified an average annual accumulation of 1,500 kg of carbon per hectare with the system without burning and leaving the straw on the ground,\u201d adds Galdos. \u201cThere is between two and three times more carbon in a layer of up to 1 meter of soil than in all the vegetation.\u201d Therefore, there is a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The particulate material, soot, was also computed in the audit. \u201cThis material goes into the atmosphere and has an effect that is related to global warming.\u201d<\/p>\n

The projects<\/strong>
\n 1.<\/strong> Development of a mechanical aid for harvesting sugarcane without prior burning (n\u00ba 2004\/14468-5<\/a>);\u00a0Modality<\/strong>\u00a0Innovative Research in Small Companies (Pipe); Coordinator\u00a0<\/strong>Efraim Albrecht Neto \u2013 Agricef;\u00a0Investment<\/strong>\u00a0R$ 430,251.88 (FAPESP)
\n2.<\/strong> Automated control of the synchronism between the sugarcane harvester and the cane trailer (n\u00ba 2006\/56581-8<\/a>);\u00a0Modality\u00a0<\/strong>Innovative Research in Small Companies (Pipe);\u00a0Coordinator\u00a0<\/strong>Rodrigo Fernando Galzerano Baldo \u2013 Agricef; Investment<\/strong>\u00a0R$ 35,954.21 (FAPESP)
\n3.<\/strong> Implement attached to a tractor for harvesting sugarcane without prior burning (n\u00ba 2007\/59163-5<\/a>);\u00a0Modality<\/strong>\u00a0Innovative Research in Small Companies (Pipe); Coordinator\u00a0<\/strong>Guilherme Ribeiro Gray \u2013 Agricef;\u00a0Investment<\/strong>\u00a0R$ 12,491.00 (FAPESP)<\/p>\n

Scientific article<\/em>
\nGALDOS, M.V. et al.<\/em> Net greenhouse gas fluxes in Brazilian ethanol production systems<\/a>. Global Change Biology Bioenergy<\/strong>. v 2. p. 37-44. 2010.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Innovations in sugarcane harvesting improve access and soil compression","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1560,169],"tags":[228,199],"coauthors":[115],"class_list":["post-5213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-innovative-research-in-small-business-pipe-en","category-technology","tag-engineering","tag-farming"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5213"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=5213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}