Florian Tinder, a farmer in Saxony, explains how John Deere's grain sensing technology measures wheat quality during threshing. The system lets him assess grain directly in the field, which improves his marketing decisions and farm planning.
Hello, I'm Florian tinder. We farm 1750 hectares in the Elbe Valley in Saxony. The quality of our wheat varies so much, but grain sensing helps us to determine the quality of our wheat right in the field. We can now optimize the sale of our grain to determine whether the wheat is suitable for a particular contract. It's not necessary anymore to first take the wheat. Instead, we can decide right in the field if it should go into the warehouse, to a distributor or to a different warehouse. In fact, this is a big help. Our combine operator was a bit skeptical at first. His first reaction was another fancy tool. What's it really going to accomplish? But now even he regularly checks on things like the rapeseed's oil content, the wheat's protein content, search levels, stock levels, oil, and I think he's really starting to get excited about it. As for me, I use the data we get from the sensors in the operations center mainly for analysis purposes. In other words, why the protein content or starch content was higher or lower at certain points in the field. With this data, I can plan for next year in order to do some things better or to repeat things that worked well. I've already had this situation myself on our farm, where I actually assess the wheat as feed wheat. Because we had grain sensing, I noticed that the protein content was significantly higher than expected. And I was then able to market the wheat as quality wheat to pay for the sensor. Sometimes 70 or 80 hectares are enough.
