Improving Farm Safety: Standards for Agricultural Machinery just updated

Ensuring the safety of tractors and other agricultural equipment means ensuring the control systems that are in place work as they are meant to. The internationally trusted set of standards for such systems has just been updated, making it even fitter for the farm.

Tractors and self-propelled ride-on machines used in agriculture and forestry have evolved over the years since Old MacDonald’s days and now feature as many electronic parts and systems as your modern car. A number of these are designed to reduce risks by preventing unintended movements and recognizing errors and other possible hazards, because ensuring the vehicles function correctly is as important as the functions themselves.

The series of standards ISO 25119, Tractors and machinery for agriculture and forestry – Safety-related parts of control systems, is widely used by the agricultural industry and its suppliers and has recently been updated. It sets out the general principles for the design and development of safety-related parts of control systems on tractors and self-propelled ride-on machines used in agriculture and forestry. It can even be applied to mobile equipment used in municipalities such as street-sweeping machines.

ISO 25119 helps designers and manufacturers ensure that safety-related parts perform as intended, and covers the system structure, fault detection mechanisms, reliability of components, operating stress, environmental conditions and more.