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New cotton harvesting equipment focuses on improved productivity

John Deere has unveiled its latest cotton harvesting equipment designed to help improve growers’ efficiency and productivity. 

Christopher Murray is the cotton product manager for John Deere.  “On the cotton picker, we now make larger and denser round modules, so we help reduce wrap costs for those customers,” he says.  “They’re not only more productive, but we’re helping lower the cost of harvest for them.  On our cotton strippers, we now have our new field cleaners that remove plant materials from the seed cotton.”

Because cotton is fully traced through its supply chain, he tells Brownfield they worked closely with growers on John Deere’s Harvest Identification Cotton Pro technology.  “We’re offloading that data every 30 seconds to operation centers,” he says.  “We’re doing it a lot quicker than what we did before.  On the 690 machines we did it 3 times a day, now we’re doing it every 30 seconds and it’s almost in real-time for our customers.”

While that level of traceability isn’t required yet, Murray says it is likely to become required in the future and these two new machines are built to meet those needs. 

AUDIO: Christopher Murray, John Deere cotton product manager