A two-day national conference onWear in Agricultural Implements and Machinery: Design,  Materials, Process & Performancewas heldon 8-9 June at College of Engineering,Pune campus. The  conference was jointly organized byIIM pune chapter, Department of Metallurgy and Materials Science,  College of Engineering Pune and Farm Implement & Machinery, Dr. Annasaheb Shinde College of  Agriculture Engineering & Technology, MPKV Rahuri, Ahmednagar. It has been realized, although, there  are dedicated conferences and sessions around Wear of engineering parts and mitigation. There is hardly  any focused discussion around wear of agriculture machineries &implements where the end customer is  the farmer. In fact, agriculture machineries &implements experience one of the harshest abrasive wear  environments from soil, crops and crop residue. The implement sector in India is unorganized and lacks an  ecosystem for joint technologydevelopment related to design and materials which fits our agriculture  practice. The purpose of this conference was to bring together multiple stake holders,in the areas of  Agriculture machineries/implements such as customer support, academia, steel mills, tractor  manufacturer, implement manufacturers and coaters/ heat treaters, to discuss on current state,  challenges, step forwards and finally to create an ecosystem for larger and sustaining interest of the stake  holders. The major sponsors for this conference were John Deere India Pvt. Ltd.(gold sponsor) and SMT (Silver sponsor). The conference was convened by Dr. Satyam Sahay, John Deere India Pvt. Ltd. and  Chairman IIM Pune chapter, Prof. T. Bastewad, MPKV Rahuri and Dr. Goutam Mohapatra, John Deere India  Pvt. Ltd. and Dr.N.B.Dhokey, Coordinator of Conference. The two days conference was attended by 100+  delegates, faculty members and students. Dr. C. R. Mehta, Project Coordinator, Central Institute of  Agricultural Engineering &All India Coordinated Research Project on Farm Implements and Machinery, was  the chief guest and key note speaker of this conference.Invited talks covered various aspects of  agriculture machinery and implement wear.The multiple invited talks covered topics around customer  perspective and requirements on agriculture implements, design of machineries and implements for land  preparation, crops harvesting, materials selection &usage, wear life enhancement strategies such as  coatings & heat treatments and understanding wear mechanisms&modeling.There was a dedicated poster  session on the second day of the conference particularly for engineering students around Pune to  showcase their research in wear and agriculture.A Q&A session was dedicated to discusson challenges and  opportunities in Agriculture machinery &implements technology development. Some of the highlights are: 1. bridging the gap between academia and implement manufacturer, 2.lack of strong collaboration  between agriculture university and metallurgy departments at other universities, 3. lack of specialized  metallurgy professor in agriculture universitiesto teach students and 4. make the area related to  Agriculture more exciting/glamorous for engineering students. The highlights of this conference were as follows:  1. It was realized that a significant disconnect between academia, steel mills, implement manufacturers and end users of implements such as tractor manufacturers exists. Dr. Pradip stressed that IIM should  play a catalyst to create a strong eco-system. All the participants agreed that this type of conferences should be organized periodically at different venues.  2. The ecosystem should identify and drive development of materials and processing specific to wear in  agriculture machinery &implements. Mere adoption of grades developed for other disciplines (such as  automobile) and tailor made it to solve agriculture related problem will hardly provide a clearvalue  proposition in this sector. Dr. Satyam Sahay in his talk highlighted that in agriculture a strong value  proposition is associated with solutions providing increasing wear life by nX instead of %.  3. Prof. N. B. Dhokey and Prof. T. B. Bastewad presented their work on how B- steel with suitable heat  treatment can result in significant increase in abrasive wear life. Most of the participants agreed that  one of the most promising and versatile grade of steel for Agriculture application is Boron steel.  However, they are currently being imported due to lack of availability in plate form in India. Steel mills  and implement manufacturer should work together to produce and design implements for this steel  grades.  4. Dr. R. Bhide and Dr. U. Mhatre discussed on thin coating solutions for improving wear life and how  these technologies are being successfully deployed in automobiles. However, they agreed that this  technology is not ready yet to handle severe abrasive wear in agriculture sector. Mr. Gujar from Essen welding highlighted the opportunities for hard facing welding alloys for agriculture implements in terms  of its versatility and cost. 5. It was also realized that to speed up adoption of new implement design academia can design  implements but its only big Machinery and implement manufacturer should support in testing of the  newlydesigns implements and refine the designs and address the scale up challenge. 6. For metallurgy students,materials related to agriculture areas arenot glamorous. Therefore, students  must be encouraged to take up and solvematerials related project in agriculture industries.Machinery &  implement manufacturers should support academia in identifying and sponsoring projects