At Agritechnica in 2019, a lineup of farm equipment makers announced a new service was under development to share information in mixed fleets. Called DataConnect, this global initiative is designed as a cloud-based service that farmers could use to manage equipment. The service has gone live with six major digital platforms engaged and is available to farm operations around the world.

The list of initial players participating in the new service includes Case IH, Steyr, New Holland, John Deere, Claas and the European farm management platform 365FarmNet, which launched the feature last fall.

With this service any farm operation using a self-propelled forage harvester, combine or tractor from the participating brands can now view specific telematic information in one participating platform. In the past that approach involved managing an added portal for each brand involved.

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Essentially if you're running a Case IH tractor with AFS connect and want to monitor your John Deere tractor using John Deere Operations Center, that's now possible.

With the service, customers can view five different machinery data parameters from their machine fleet:

All a farmer must do to use the option is to provide themselves with the permission to view all equipment in the platform most convenient for them. Once connected, the machines of the other manufacturers appear automatically in that portal. The vehicles are even displayd ith icons in the respective brand colors.

DataConnect works without adding any hardware or software components and is designed to be secure. The solution will work with thousands of connected machines already in the field.

A company source at CNH notes that there is no extra charge for access to DataConnect for its machines, but due to competitive rules other companies can if there is a charge. Farmers can reach out to their dealers for more information about DataConnect and their fleets.

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