FEATURE
The Tool Every Farm Needs At Harvest: Bushel Plus Frustrated with mounting harvest losses, Marcel Kringe went to work.
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Every year we’re seeing a massive investment of time, money and resources going into growing the best crop and then at harvest I kept seeing that some farms were throwing away five percent, or more, of their yield because there wasn’t a system out there to accurately quantify and calculate the value of harvest loss,” said Kringe, an agronomist who has worked on small and large farms around the world. Kringe was tired of seeing combines run at less than full capacity and recognized that loss monitors were constantly fluctuating. He also found some sensors weren’t always accurate leading to operators running the machine at what they believed was an acceptable level while losses piled up or speeds slowed down to the point where they became an issue. After identifying the problem, Kringe went to work on a solution inventing the Bushel Plus system, which is the first tool that lets farmers accurately test losses and quantify them on any combine in order to calibrate their machine and put more money in their pockets.
24 | November - December 2020
that covered the pan until we were ready to drop it,” Kringe said. “Anyone who has operated a combine will understand the pan must be protected to keep kernels and chaff from filling it prior to your point-in-time drop otherwise the sample’s integrity is destroyed.”
Marcel Kringe - Co-Owner - Bushel Plus
After building several prototypes and spending thousands of hours testing, Bushel Plus is now the most sophisticated yet user friendly tool to measure harvest loss on the market. “One of the first things we identified early on was that the system had to have a housing unit
Kringe designed a housing unit that not only protects the sample pan but is easy to move from combine to combine during harvest. Two high-strength magnets connect the system to the combine, where it’s usually placed under the straw elevator or on the machine’s rear axle. Once connected, a wireless signal activates the drop function which releases the pan onto the ground where the combine passes over and a sample of swath is deposited in the pan for testing. “We knew it had to be simple, fast and accurate,” said Kringe adding that the battery-powered system is good for more than 100 drops before being recharged. “No one is going to stop for an extended period of time during harvest to take a sample but if we can do it in minutes and the result is a small tweak to the machine or recognition
