Canadian harvest optimization company Bushel Plus is growing in North America thanks to a partnership with John Deere to bring the company’s SmartPan System to dealers across the U.S. and Canada, helping growers reduce harvest loss and earn more money.
Launched in 2012, Bushel Plus offers a drop-pan measurement system, called SmartPan System, that is specifically calibrated to grain loss sensors on combines to assess how much crop is being lost during a harvest, Marcel Kringel, CEO and founder, told AgTechNavigator. The company also offers after-market concaves, miniature combines, and grain shakers.
The system comes with a magnetic drop pan that is attached to the combine and SmartDrop, a web-based application that tracks combine information, which can be sent to a driver or farmer manager via WhatsApp, Kringel explained.
Harvest loss is a major issue impacting food security globally. Nearly a third (30%) of global food loss comes from agricultural production and harvesting, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
SmartPan is a “tool to help you calibrate and quantify the grain loss and realize what the combine is actually doing. And now imagine you are going from a few bushels loss that you maybe were not aware of to only half a bushel grain loss, and you times that by X amount of acres on the farm,” Kringel elaborated.
John Deere, Bushel Plus help farmers address harvest loss
Bushel Plus and John Deere are working together to complement each other’s capabilities, Kringel noted.
John Deere’s Harvest Setting Automation adjusts combine parameters — like concave clearance, fan and rotor speed, and sieve and chaffer settings — with the SmartPan System providing ground-truth data to those John Deere capabilities, Bushel Plus shared in a press release. This allows farmers to tune their harvest settings, so they lose less of their harvest.
“If you dial in a combine, you could lose a few bushels, without realizing it, because [there] could be something wrong in the combine. It could be a wrong setting or a calibration,” Kringel elaborated.
Without a solution like Bushel Plus, farmers would have to resort to manually finding and picking up kernels on a field, which can be inefficient and potentially unsafe, Kringel said.
“Essentially, we are going away from the guesswork — or even unsafe work of running beside the combine with a shovel trying to catch a sample from what is coming out the back of the machine. So, we are going away from that and making that more efficient and effective,” he noted.
