Testing positioning hardware with John Deere ahead of selective cutting

Rasmus, KA Skog, and Erik, Hyggligt

We’ve been visiting John Deere Forestry in Emmaboda frequently in recent weeks. Ahead of a harvest with a John Deere harvester (skördare) in northern Sweden later this spring, we worked together to install, test, and adapt our hardware and software for precise positioning of the harvester head.

With accurate head positioning, it becomes easier for harvester operators to find the trees to cut according to our harvesting plan for selective cutting (plockhuggning). On the machine computer, Hyggligt’s software visualizes the trees to be harvested together with the exact position of the machine and the head.

Precise harvester-head positioning is a prerequisite for scaling precision forestry with our method—centered selective cutting (centrerad plockhuggning)—where tree selection is optimized for profitable continuous-cover forestry (hyggesfritt skogsbruk).

We’d like to send a big thank you to the John Deere team in Emmaboda—and to Rasmus at KA Skog—for all the excellent help getting this project over the finish line.