Jeremy Faust, a product manager at John Deere, explains Machine Sync, a technology that improves harvester productivity and cuts grain loss during harvest. The system syncs machinery to work more efficiently in the field.
Welcome, Jeremy, and thank you for your time. Just explain to me a role within ISG and John Deere.
Yeah, so I'm a product manager for machine coordination and that means that I am responsible for products such as Machine Sync and active fill control on forage harvesters.
Just going more into product and you said Machine Sync is one of your products and you just give us more information and value of the product for a customer.
Yeah, for sure. So Machine Sync, if you're not familiar with Machine sync, it is a product that holds a follower relative to a leader. So think of a combine operation. The combine can be unloading into a tractor and the tractor is held at a steady position relative to the leader. It's really valuable, especially for us in region four, as a lot of times we have really tough time. Our customers have a really tough time finding skilled operators for grain carts. It's really tough to find labor in general. So a lot of times these are just part time employees or part time helpers that show up on their farm for six weeks just for harvest season or eight week harvest season, and the operator is really, or the owner of the operation is really trusting this person that they barely know to drive their really expensive piece of equipment. So Machine Sync just really helps to kind of bridge that gap between having novice operators in the cab of a machine and then giving that ability to control that follower to the person in the combine.
Do you all see an increasing productivity once the customer starts utilizing machine sink? And then maybe, you know, a big thing to also that is grain loss because you know, they don't drive quick enough and then you start leaving seed on the ground to see.
Yep, absolutely. So there's definitely a reduction of spills with Machine Sync. If you think about how quickly things can happen just in that operation while you're unloading. Now we have that follower completely locked underneath the auger and just giving that ability then for the machine to just be locked in that position and not have that relative motion between the tractor and the combine. Yeah, that's one of the huge benefits. As for productivity as well, it really comes down to just having that comfort, that ability now to lock that machine in place relative to the combine. And yeah, absolutely, we've seen that productivity increase. And that really just comes down to the comfort of the leader being able to unload into the follower, not have to worry about that follower drifting one way or the other. Are they gonna hit my head? Are they gonna continue to. To just drive forward and spill? You start to see things like the less auger shut offs in combine operations and things like that. Our customers do really love the product that use it.
And you talk about, you know, we just talk about harvesting. What other applications will this be useful in?
Yeah, absolutely. So machine sync can be applied to a combine, a forage harvester or a tractor. So in operations such as potato harvest or sugar beet harvest, in region four, we see tractor to tractor, machine sink. But also in forage harvesting operations, we'll see an SPFH that will have followers that are John Deere tractors utilizing machine sink.
