Podcast Ep. 178: Post-Harvest Calibration

If you haven't listened to that one I would encourage you to go back, take a listen, but always keep in mind that we do want to do the best we can on the front side to make sure we're collecting good clean data. Now, we know that's not always possible. Something happens. Maybe we've got a loaner combine in the field, or we just weren't able to get that one or a different machine calibrated properly. We can go back and post-calibrate. 

Now, some of these tools are not new, per se, to the operation center, but where we can find them and the amount of post-calibration that we can do, some of that stuff is new. What are we doing with post-harvest calibration? Essentially what we're doing is we're able to take all of those harvested weights and we're able to put that into the John Deere Operation Center, and it will recalculate everything to make sure we have the proper average yields across the field. Our maps, our yield maps look appropriate to where the variability lies. 

Now, of course, the variability, or where that variability is, is not going to change. All that changes is the scale of what our legend looks like, what our highs are, what our lows are, and then everything in between. We have the ability to make the overall adjustment or the overall post-harvest calibration, but what we can also do, which is a pretty neat tool, is if we have those of you out there that are harvesting with multiple combines in the same field. We can now truth those combines, or we can make adjustments to make sure that those combines are calibrated together. 

Maybe you've got two combines, three combines, maybe you've got 10 combines in the field. What we can do is actually a really simple process and we'll walk through it, but it is just a slider and we're adjusting the outcome of what that combine was reading to make it match more towards what we think is the actual number that should be coming out. Not only can we do post-harvest calibration but then we can also do multiple machine calibration. 

It's a really neat feature in the operation center. Like I said, it's not necessarily new. It has been there, but now it is very easy to get to, very easy to find. Where we go into to find that is just going into your operation center and going into field analyzer. In that tool where we look at any of our agronomic data layers, our maps, whatever we're looking at there, all we need to do is go to the field that we want to make changes to. In that field, you can pull up your yield map. Say we're looking at the East quarter, and we want to pull up that yield map. 

Now what you'll notice is down on the bottom, you'll see all of the information that comes out of that field. Our averages, the equipment we utilize, all of that type of stuff, and if you go over to the right-hand side, there's an edit button. Now you'll notice the edit button. When you click on it, it has a bunch of different things that you can edit. Everything from work notes to area harvested and post-calibration to varieties to, I believe, crop and season as well. We can make changes to all of that stuff, but what we want to focus on today is the editing the area harvested and post calibration. That's one thing that I actually forgot to mention a few couple minutes ago here, is we can also edit the area that is harvested. Maybe our data comes in and we're not getting it as clean as we want to on the front side, and we're overlapping. We've got a lot of overlap. Maybe our, it's not section control, but our overlap control with the combine head. 

Maybe we don't have overlap control turned on, or maybe we're doing things to where we're over harvesting or we're counting more acres than what we're actually harvesting. What we can do in that case is we can make the adjustment to the harvested area. No matter what we have, no matter what we're dealing with, we can make that change. Say we're dealing with an 80 acre field, and it says that we harvested 93 acres for some reason, don't know why, but we've got 13 extra acres that it harvested. What we can do is we can adjust that number right from in here. 

You click on the edit area harvested and post calibration, and you'll see there's two tabs up top yield and wet weight. The first one that comes up is yield. You'll see across the top it says area harvested and there's your acres. What we can do is we can make that adjustment so that 93 number, we can bring that down to 80 and it will recalculate what it needs to. Now the other thing we can do is total yield for the field. If we know exactly what those scale tickets were, exactly what we put in our grain set up at home, no matter what it is, if we know what that total yield was off of that field, we can punch that in right there and then again, it will recalculate the numbers to make everything post calibrate. 

Now the other neat feature to this is the equipment calibration. If you are utilizing multiple machines in the field, there's a little dropdown or a triangle next to the equipment calibration. If you click on it, you'll pull up any of the machines that were harvesting in that field. You'll notice that you've got your little red and green, red green, yellow sliders on both of those machines. You'll have what the average yield was for each machine, and you'll have total harvested for each machine. All of that stuff is right there. 

Now, one thing to keep in mind, you'll notice there's a little padlock. With that little padlock what we can do is we can actually lock one of these machines. If we know that one was calibrated properly and we really like the numbers that were coming off of that one, we can hit that padlock and what that'll do is that'll lock that machine. We can then adjust the other machine or machines to mirror that machine there. You'll notice if you've got machines that are very-- I guess they're not calibrated very well, you may have one machine that's getting really high numbers and one machine that's getting really low numbers. 

You'll be able to see those strips in your map and what we can do with this slider makes it very easy is we can just adjust the slider to make it flow better. We obviously know if you're going past for pass, we're not going to have drastic differences in those yields unless of course you're doing a strip trial treatment of some sort where you are affecting that. In this case, if it's just a typical field, you're not going to have that much variability, 

so you can reign that in a little bit. 

Very cool, very neat. You can also just reset or revert any of the changes that have been done or have been made, and it'll revert it back to the raw data. That's another cool feature for this. The other piece, if we go up top and we click on wet weight, we can also look at our moisture and we can adjust our moisture for what the average is or what we were getting off of that field. In the instance that our machines were not calibrated or moisture monitors, or moisture sensors, were not calibrated in the field. 

We also have the ability to do that. We can calibrate, or we-- I should say, we can adjust our harvested area, we can adjust our total yield, total dry yield off the combine. We can make those equipment calibration adjustments, so machine for machine, we can make those adjustments there. Then we can also adjust our wet weight. There again, total wet weight as well as our moisture. Just wanted to touch based on this because I thought, of course giving the time of the year here in the middle of harvest some of you may be wrapping up harvest, some of you may be starting next season's crop already, but at the end of harvest, we're going in, we're looking at our information in our data. Post harvest calibration may be a useful tool for you. If we could not get the machines calibrated on the front side, we know things happen. It doesn't always work out that way but that is why we have the ability to post calibrate within the operation center. 

Then that other piece, having multiple machines in the field, getting those matched up properly so that we don't have drastic highs and drastic lows when it comes to machine by machine basis. A lot of very useful tools when it comes to collecting our final yield data or our final harvest data. Hopefully it's beneficial for you if your farm is out there utilizing multiple machines and or you don't have the ability to calibrate as you're going through the field. 

There's a lot of farms that maybe you don't have a scale on your grain cart. You have no way to actually calibrate your yield monitor. Post harvest calibration is a great tool to be able to utilize to get accurate data that you're looking for. Hopefully this was helpful to you. Hopefully you can make use of it on your operation or parts of this on your operation. We'll catch you on the next one.