At first blush, the benefits promised by new autonomous retrofit grain cart system, OutRun, seemed too good to be true to Ken Ferrie and his agronomic team.
The system, now commercially available, promises to help farmers increase harvest efficiencies while reducing labor needs in the process.
Ferrie and team’s skepticism quickly turned to appreciation as they put the system to work harvesting large-scale Farm Journal Test Plots in central Illinois.
“Once it’s in the field, it’s kind of like a dog with a shock collar,” says Ferrie, Farm Journal Field Agronomist. “It can’t leave the field, meaning that there’s a GPS fence around that field that keeps it from leaving that defined area.”
OutRun, developed by PTx Trimble (formed by AGCO and Trimble), enables a tractor and auger cart to team up and move autonomously to catch a combine on the go.
The system uses Starlink connectivity and PTx Trimble location technology, while the combine’s guidance and steering system remains unchanged. Field boundaries loaded into the OutRun system keep the cart/tractor team where it needs to be.
Less Manpower Potentially Required
Nebraska farmer Geoffrey Ruth says he is pumped about the practicality and ease-of-use of driverless grain cart automation. The opportunity to reduce manpower needs or redeploy a worker is especially appealing.
“We’re usually pretty short on labor at harvest time, so we’re looking to purchase one outright and take that operator and throw them in a semi to haul grain,” Ruth says in this recent article by Farm Journal’s Matthew Grassi: Smart Harvest: How One Farmer Is Hitting Harvest Windows, Helping Others With Grain Cart Tech
As Ruth and Ferrie quickly learned, the grain cart can be staged or called for unloading without the need for another driver.
Once full, the combine operator can then send the grain cart to a predefined truck unload zone for unloading. An operator is still needed, however, to unload the cart into a truck.
“Once you get a full tank, you call for the cart, and the cart will pull up beside the combine and unload on the go for you, or you could stage it at the end, so it’s waiting for you when you get there,” says Ferrie, whose agronomic team at Crop-Tech Consulting are running the system.
The truck driver can then disengage the cart, fill the truck and then reengage the cart so the combine operator can take control of the system again.
“Your combine operator can put the cart anywhere he wants it to go,” Ferrie says. “If you’ve got tile holes, terraces, or other places in the field you don’t want that cart to go, the combine operator can draw those areas on the screen and tell it, ‘these are no-go areas,’ so it doesn’t get itself into trouble.”
Ruth adds that the system also knows where the farmer already cut corn and will use that area as a path instead of mowing over crops that haven’t been harvested yet. It’s similar to how a drone already knows the safe path home when the pilot hits return to home on the controller.
OutRun is currently available for model year 2014 or newer John Deere 8R tractors with Infinitely Variable Transmission (IVT) and will be commercially available on Fendt models in 2026.
You can learn more about PTx Trimble’s OutRun system at www.OutRunAg.com
