HarvestersSPFH Oper­ator and Devel­op­ment Engi­neer in One

A change in the weather, with a longer period of rain, is fore­cast for the coming Sunday. For this reason, farmer Stefan Jacobs from Losheim am See decides to bring forward the silage corn harvest for his cows, even though the plants have not yet reached full matu­rity. But once the heavy soil becomes soaked, the fields may not be pass­able for a long time, and he isn’t willing to take that risk.

Here in western Germany, close to the borders with Luxem­bourg and France, the fields are small, hilly and irreg­u­larly shaped. After a wet growing season, the corn stands tall, and under today’s sunny skies, condi­tions are ideal for harvesting.

In total, 30 hectares of corn across 15 fields are to be harvested on the day’s schedule.

Living a child­hood dream

Laurin Müller is at the steering wheel of the forage harvester. As a teenager, he helped out a lot on a friend of his father’s farm, often oper­ating trac­tors during the chop­ping season. He had wanted to become a farmer himself, but with no family farm to take over, he chose another path.
After completing his Abitur (A-levels) at a tech­nical high school after finishing secondary school, he went on to study elec­trical engi­neering. Even­tu­ally, he joined John Deere in Zweibrücken where he now works on the devel­op­ment of the SPFH cab.

Oper­ating a John Deere forage harvester for a contractor in his spare time allows Müller to live out his child­hood dream while directly comple­menting his main job. Conse­quently, he knows first-hand exactly what a forage harvester oper­ator needs.

After finishing the last rows of corn on a sloping plot, he moves on to the neigh­bouring field, which borders a forest. Before starting, he checks his monitor and spots fruit trees on the oppo­site edge of the field. “Since we have inte­grated Google Maps into our monitor, it is much easier for oper­a­tors to iden­tify obsta­cles early on,” he explains.

Func­tional test in prac­tical use

The John Deere 9900i SPFH that Laurin is oper­ating today was built in 2019 and belongs to a local contractor. The region is char­ac­terised by small fields and limited budgets with customers rarely willing to invest in as advanced features like surveying field bound­aries, yield maps, or analysis or crop ingre­di­ents. Never­the­less, Laurin has equipped the machine with all the addi­tional tech­nical compo­nents, including Harvest Lab and the latest-gener­a­tion displays. This lets him field-test the soft­ware and the touchscreen’s program­ming. He has already gath­ered numerous valu­able ideas for his work, such as user-friendly posi­tioning of touch­screen controls.

Thanks to his work at John Deere, Laurin can equip the contractor’s forage harvester with the latest compo­nents and features.

His prac­tical, hands-on expe­ri­ence of chop­ping helps him develop ideas for even greater user-friend­li­ness.

The SPFH is also fitted with the Machi­ne­Sync system, which allows it to control the tractor driving along­side, making crop transfer far easier. Today, however, the collec­tion trailers are not pulled by John Deere trac­tors, so Laurin must rely on the discharge spout camera to load the wagons opti­mally. As is quite common in this region, one trailer is driven by the farmer, while the contractor’s employee oper­ates the other. The three-man team works together seam­lessly, and the loading runs smoothly.

The oper­a­tors form a well-coor­di­nated team, ensuring smooth filling of the collec­tion trailers.

The camera on the discharge spout helps Laurin opti­mise loading preci­sion.

Tinkerers in the forage harvester cab

Back at John Deere, Laurin assists his colleagues with field trials and is also respon­sible for the further devel­op­ment of the addi­tive dosing system, in addi­tion to the SPFH cab.

Both as an oper­ator and during testing, he noticed that microor­gan­isms in the addi­tive can clog the dosing system if not cleaned imme­di­ately after use. “For this reason, the new F8/F9 field chopper gener­a­tion has been equipped with a fresh­water tank. Now the system can be flushed in the field,” explains Laurin.

“A field SPFH oper­ator is actu­ally a tinkerer”, Laurin continues. “As the machine is subjected to such heavy use, there are many wearing parts that have to be replaced repeat­edly. I always keep a set of over­alls in the cab.

His penchant for tinkering and problem-solving is also evident in the cab layout. He constantly eval­u­ates details such as the posi­tioning of the addi­tional display in the upper-right corner along with the ergonomics. The mobile phone holder to the right of the control console is also not yet avail­able on stan­dard machines – whether it will ever be provided will be deter­mined by an exten­sive eval­u­a­tion process at John Deere. In any case, working as an oper­ator in his spare time helps Laurin Müller better under­stand his customers’ require­ments and provides him with valu­able insights for his main job as a devel­op­ment engi­neer.