John Deere's HarvestLab sensor system won the Highly Commended prize in the Award For Innovation category at the 2014 Farm Business Cream Awards, which recognise the best innovations, ideas and success stories in the dairy industry.

The award was judged by an eight-strong panel headed by NFU President Meurig Raymond.

"The Cream Awards have really built on their position as the benchmark Dairy Industry Awards," said organiser Caroline Whibley. "For this, the second year of the awards, the entries were once again fantastic and the winning line-up is hugely impressive."


HarvestLab sensor system

For this year's grass and maize season, John Deere's HarvestLab sensor system for the 7080 and new 8000 Series self-propelled forage harvester range is uniquely able to measure a full range of crop constituents for the first time, quickly and accurately while on the move. The constituent range includes sugars, starch, protein and crude fibre content, as well as dry matter.

John Deere is currently the only manufacturer with a proven, accurate, commercially available system for measuring both grass and maize constituents in real time. Mounted on the forager spout and taking crop readings 17 times per second, the versatile HarvestLab system can also be removed from the forager spout to allow it to be used for stationary feed analysis of different forage ingredients and for clamp silage analysis in the winter.