John Deere S7 Increases Productivity

During October, Sinclair Tractor customers were given the opportunity to demonstrate the new John Deere S7 700 combine.  The machine was loaded up with all available technologies, including Harvest Settings Automation (HSA) and Predictive Ground Speed Automation (PGSA).  These new and exciting technologies are the future of grain harvesting - building on the foundations of Combine Advisor and Harvest Smart, they take automation to a whole new level by increasing grain quality and machine efficiency. HAS and PGAS are available on John Deere S and X series combines beginning with model year 2025.

Harvest Settings Automation incorporates a camera system to show results and utilizes five internal combine settings (Threshing Clearance, Rotor Speed, Fan Speed, Sieve Clearance and Chaffer Clearance) to maximize grain quality while minimizing grain loss.  HSA makes optimizing the combine faster and easier by providing starting acceptable limit recommendations for each harvesting outcome input: grain loss, foreign material, and broken grain.  Once the combine settings are optimized, the operator makes any final adjustments to obtain the desired sample and loss, changes are automatically made to maintain combine performance.

In addition to the inputs, Predictive Ground Speed Automation incorporates two additional sensing inputs into the software logic for automatically controlling the combine’s ground speed during harvest: Satellite Views and Forward Cameras. Individually, these technologies predict crop biomass by detecting crop variability ahead of the combine and thereby providing necessary ground speed adjustments where identified. Working dually together, both subsystems enable uptime performance as they can supply crop predictions throughout every possible condition during harvest.

During the demonstrations, growers were given the opportunity to run the machine without the technology features enabled to establish a baseline level of performance on their farm in current crop conditions.  After the baseline was established, the technology was enabled and the difference in performance was able to be experienced first- hand.  The charts below show the performance difference between technology enabled and disabled - broken down by week.

In all cases machine productivity and throughput where greater, fuel consumption and grain loss were less, and grain quality was improved when the technology was enabled over operating the machine with the technology disabled.  

If you would like to know more about the new S7 combine and integrated technologies, please reach out. Sinclair Tractor is excited by technology and wants to be your partner in achieving success.

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