Harvesting data

Contractors often make big buying decisions to meet the demands of their customers, however, this is not the case for Mark Conder and his two NIR crop sensors. “Back in 2018 our local John Deere dealer was making noise about their HarvestLab sensors,” says the Lancashire based contractor. “I’d already looked into them and made the switch to Deere foragers mainly to get the technology in our yard.

“Previously we’d run Claas and Krone machines, and while they had impressive performance, the technology and connectivity side of things wasn’t in the same league. The Big X in particular could seriously chop grass, we ran a 700 and later 770, but both fell down to a number of reliability issues. Our tractors are all currently green and yellow, so everything links up through John Deere’s JD Link system sending data wirelessly to their Operations Centre