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When it comes to grain harvesting, time is money and mess equals stress.

Raven Industries (now CNH Industrial) developed a product to address those concerns, and Travis Burgers, a research engineer at CNH and an adjunct assistant professor in mechanical engineering at South Dakota State University, and CNH colleague Matt Horne developed a concept to test the effectiveness of the product before it even went on the market.

As a result, Burgers and Horne won the 2025 Rain Bird Engineering Concept of the Year Award by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers. It will be presented at the group’s annual international meeting in Toronto July 16. 

The CNH product, Raven Cart Automation, syncs up the grain cart to the combine in terms of speed and steering during combine unloading. In 2024, Raven Cart Automation was selected as one of the top 50 engineering innovations in the nation. The computerized pairing speeds unloading and ensures the grain cart is fully filled while also eliminating spills.

For the operators, that is a big stress reducer. That is what Burgers and Horne are being recognized for.

They developed and executed a repeatable method to measure how automation affects agricultural operator stress and, for the first time, showed the impact of operator stress at the time of new product release.

Stress reduced 12% to 18%

Their research study was published in the Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health. The authors report stress was measured in harvest operators who performed on-the-go unloading manually and with an automated system. Automated unloading reduced the average grain cart and combine operator stress rate by 18% and 12%, respectively, compared to manual operation.

They also noted harvest operators usually worked more than nine hours and often worked more than 12 hours per day during harvest. “The use of automated unloading systems could positively affect the health of harvest operators,” the report stated.

In the Concept of the Year nomination, it was stated the nominees recruited harvest participants who did on-the-go unloading during wheat, corn and soybean harvest. The participants performed on-the-go unloads both manually (the traditional approach) and with Raven Cart Automation. Commercially available wristbands were used to quantify harvest operator biological stress response during these on-the-go unload events. 

The nominees also documented the procedure, including sharing code in the open-access repository Figshare to process data from wristbands to calculate stressful events, so that this method could be replicated in the future.

Provides measuring stick for other innovations

Further, it states, “The novel method lays a framework for how the agricultural engineering industry could use this technique to demonstrate automation product value as the industry progresses in automation. There is a problem in the industry with a lack of skilled labor and an increase in the cost of labor, thus the interest in autonomy is growing. 

“As the agriculture industry continues to develop and adopt automated solutions, this technique can be used to measure how beneficial the products are operator health.”

Burgers said, “Engineering loves to be able to quantify value for our products. In this case, really rigorous, dependable numbers. This resonates with customers.”

Burgers said, “I have a background in medical devices and medical research. At CNH, I work on the data team, which involves me answering engineering and business questions with data. For this project, I combined some of my research skills, agricultural experience, biomedical engineering background and ability to plan and execute into a rigorous experiment to quantify the value proposition for a new product. 

“It was an interesting intersection of agricultural engineering, biomedical engineering and data research to show the value of a new product for our customers.”

A South Dakota native, Burgers has been an ����ֱ��app adjunct assistant professor since 2019. He mentors on graduate research thesis committees and collaborates on research.