From the Fields - Charley Mathews Jr.

By Charley Mathews Jr., Yuba County rice grower 

I’ve been using an app called John Deere Operations Center. It’s been very helpful—a huge jump technology-wise from where we started. I can track the performance of all my equipment and see how efficient the operators are, fuel consumption, all sorts of things. Then I can analyze the data and get a better idea of cost and anything I can do to improve, like if tractors are inefficient at one thing and more efficient in others.

I was able to gather data from harvesting, which is an expensive operation. That’s probably the most valuable data—tracking harvester performance—because that’s becoming one of the most expensive investments you make equipment-wise. You could find out which (harvest) methods are more efficient because we can use a conventional header or a stripper header.

We had some opportunities to run some new equipment on a demo basis and see what the performance of that versus the equipment I already had. We’ve got a year of data already, which is huge. I’ve gained more in one year than in the last 10. Before that, it was a guess. I could track performance hourly, but fuel consumption and other things were a stab in the dark. I’m finding fuel consumption was lower than my original assumptions, which is good. You can monitor a driver’s performance and how he utilizes his time and how much time the tractor is working during his shift. Then I can tell who’s good and who’s bad and how to make changes.

It’s maintenance season, so we’re working on equipment to get ready for next year. Harvest was fine. We had good weather and no rain delays, so it made harvest much smoother. Quality was pretty good in our area. Yields were down for everybody, no matter when you planted. The common belief is that we had hot temperatures during flowering. But yields (of other crops) were down, so rice followed that same trend.