Trevor Scherman and partner Megan Madden are making it easy for farmers to connect during harvest time to get the best settings for their combines.
It’s an idea that Scherman says arose from the same philosophy as the ScherGain Solutions System he previously co-founded with his father. That system involves the use of a drop pan to better gauge how many bushels per acre are lost behind the combine.
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Combinesettings.com is a web-based platform and app in which farmers create a profile, add their combine and settings to their profile and then receive and provide feedback with farmers across the world.
“Peer-to-peer isn’t a new thing, but it’s now the old thing that’s now on the internet,” Scherman said.
“You have your own combine settings, so when you log in, you post that you have a John Deere 9660 or whatever,” said Madden. “Here’s all my settings, my concave, fan speed, et cetera. Then people can comment on it, say, ‘Oh, have you tried this concave? Have you done this?'”
Described as a Reddit-type web forum, the site allows comments and questions under certain topics, and uses an up- or down-voting system to show which advice has merit.
The website launched earlier in July, with the app released Wednesday. Madden and Sherman said the traffic coming through their booth at Ag in Motion has been a welcome surprise.
“It’s been live for a while, and we’ve been slowly launching it to some farmers that we know asking for feedback,” said Madden.
“I felt bad for the development team. We were chatting with people and they’ll say, ‘Does it do this?’ and we’re like, ‘Yep,’ then go to the trailer and email the guys that we need to do this.”
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On Tuesday, the product won the Ag in Motion Innovations Award for Business Solutions at this year’s event, which came as a surprise to Scherman and Madden.
“We didn’t expect it at all,” said Scherman. “We applied for it, went to it and was like, ‘What, we just won?'”
Winning the award certainly helped the brand garner some recognition, as it does for most innovations award winners.
“We had a lot of people stop by and they said, ‘oh, I saw a bunch of social media about it afterwards,’ or ‘I saw you guys won this award.’ So, it was a good little kick-start for us,” said Scherman.
“People have been really excited about it.”
Farmers weren’t the only interested parties to visit the booth — retailers and corporations across the combine industry came by as well.
“We’ve had companies that have come to us, after-market companies for combine products, say, ‘I want all my customers on your site,’ ” said Scherman.
“Some of those people have 200, 500 customers. We said on Tuesday we’re going to gather our thoughts and have a call because a lot has happened in the past few days.”
With the website only being up for a short time, they are hoping to take the feedback they’ve received, implement it in their site and take it to ag shows across the world to grab the global market while they can and find new ways to keep expanding and improving.
“It’s really professional, we’ve put a lot of money into development and that’s not slowing down anytime soon,” said Madden. “We’re making it global as quick as we can.”
The two are planning on attending trade shows in Australia, Germany, Ukraine and elsewhere in the next couple of years.
