07/03/08 Power & Economy

Power and Economy. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. I hate to sound like a broken record but gas prices are high. And along with that those trips round a round a field on the tractor get more and more difficult for farmers to pay for. One thing I have found out, there are no high mileage, diesel sipping tractors. But the folks at Massey-Ferguson are making huge in-roads in getting good power plus good economy according to John Bohnker, product marketing specialist for Agco. BOHNKER: We have two different power units. We have a Perkins engine on the smaller sized tractors as well as a SisuDiesel engine in our 130 horsepower and bigger. And both those engines are extremely fuel efficient by themselves and then we couple them with either a Power 6 transmission or a CVT transmission, a transmission that's made by one of our sister companies that's a variable type transmission. Bohnker says the DynaVT transmission is really where the rubber meets the road so to speak. BOHNKER: It brings a lot of technology to the tractor that no body else has the ability to match and what it does is it allows the engine to operate at the most fuel efficient spot that it possibly can because the transmission governs the load in the field. It's not just driving around the field but what and how you pull. BOHNKER: Normally an engines sweet spot is somewhere around 16, 17, 1800 rpm's but most engines have to run closer to 2100rpms to allow for the governor action to handle the increase in demand as they go through the field. With the DynaVT where we can reduce the rpm's down to 17, 1800 we can easily save 15 to 20% on fuel efficiencies just because we have the engine running in the sweet spot all the way across the field. As long as I can remember, the tractor has run on diesel and while that is not likely to change due to the high amount of power it provides, Bohnker says that Massey-Ferguson is looking to the future. BOHNKER: We're already B100 as far as utilizing bio-diesel's. So we're fully in that range right now. Other things that we are looking at as we get into 2011 and 2014 we have some pretty stringent environmental regulations coming at us to get to what's called Tier 4 engines out here. We're looking at several different technologies to get us there. We're confident we can get it so the good news is the technologies we are looking at will possibly bring about another 10% fuel savings. For more information visit them online at www.masseyferguson.com That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.