Electrification kit helps harvest off-boarded electricity

A John Deere electrification kit enables driving the fan with an electric motor powered by off-boarded electricity from John Deere’s Series eAutoPowr Electric Variable Transmission (EVT) technology. (Photo: John Deere Power Systems)

Editor’s Note: The following application was the winner of the 2024 Power Progress Summit Awards’ Off-Highway Product Application of the Year.

Potato farmers like Matt Porter, owner/operator of Porter Farms in Washburn, Maine, face underground obstructions on a daily basis. “We grow a little over 1,300 acres of potatoes. One of the challenges we have here in Maine is we have so many stones in our soil,” he commented.

Thankfully, mechanization has made life easier for farmers like Porter, both in this region and elsewhere. “The evolution over the past 50 years has gone from hand picking just the potatoes in the field to using air to separate the potatoes and stones in the field through the form of a potato harvester.”

Porter’s tool of choice is a 6631 AirSep Potato Harvester from Spudnik Equipment Co. LLC, a Blackfoot, Idaho-based manufacturer of potato and root crop machinery. The three-row 6631 AirSep is designed to dig up potatoes and, using a powerful air current, separate out dirt, rocks and other debris.

Traditionally, the harvester’s fan leverages auxiliary power from the tractor towing the implement. But this can make it difficult to achieve consistent airflow while also maintaining consistent speeds to match varying conditions across terrain and load changes.

“When a tractor running at full horsepower is going down a hill, everything runs really easy. It’s not utilizing all of its power,” Porter said. But as the tractor starts to go uphill, there is a higher power draw from the tractor, which can in turn impact harvester performance.

“You either need to increase the rpms, which forces more air through your AirSep, or risk struggling to reach those rpms, resulting in less airflow to the AirSep,” Porter pointed out. This translates to one of two outcomes: either more stones and debris in the load, or a greater number of damaged potatoes that won’t make it to the final crop.

Electrified solution

Spudnik set out to find a way to decouple the dependency of harvester functions from a tractor’s power take-off (PTO). It collaborated with John Deere Power Systems to find a solution.

Fan speed can be kept constant independent of engine speed and changed with a push of a button, adapting to varying soil types and conditions. (Photo: John Deere Power Systems)

That solution came in the form of a John Deere electrification kit that enables driving the fan with an electric motor powered by off-boarded electricity from John Deere’s Series eAutoPowr Electric Variable Transmission (winner of the 2023 Diesel Progress Summit Achievement of the Year Award), rather than via mechanical connection to the tractor’s PTO. The Electric Variable Transmission, available for select John Deere 8 Series tractors, replaces a traditional hydrostatic drive with an electromechanical system that can also provide up to 100 kW of power for offboarding to implement use.

With this advancement, fan speed can be kept constant independent of the engine speed and be changed with a push of a button to adapt to different soil types and conditions. Operators can maintain optimal engine speed, ground speed and airflow, ensuring that potatoes are harvested effectively while discarding debris.

“Before you were always guessing with your throttle. With this E-Drive, we’re able to adjust that on the fly,” said Brent Rigby, Spudnik regional eastern sales manager. “You’re able to operate that fan at its most efficient set point in different soil types and terrains. You’re no longer having to optimize for other things like traction loading on your engine or belt speeds or things like that.

“Now we can do some things that we haven’t been able to do and that’s going to be important going forward to make this crop more profitable for the grower and also more efficient in being able to get it into market,” he stated.

“It’s made harvesting potatoes much easier.”