The Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute at Humboldt looked how machinery can reduce, or contribute to, harvest loss.

PAMI Project Manager Nathan Gregg says one of the biggest mistakes farmers are making is trusting that their new machine can handle more crop.

"We fall prey to some of the marketing that goes on and that's not to fault manufacturers or anything like that, it's just the natural tendency is you buy something new and you want to make use of it. Although that machine maybe has more horsepower and is capable of a higher productivity rate, that just doesn't apply uniformly across your whole farm the whole year. You can't utilize all of that power all day long."

Gregg says these oversights can have a major impact on your operations bottom line.

"We've seen 15 bushels per acre of loss, that's not common. We think people should be targeting for that one to two bushels per acre as often as they can. We know that it creeps higher than that, commonly you know up to five bushels per acre and beyond that. There is always cases through out the year that someone is spitting more out than they ever knew they were."

Gregg suggests producers need to change their settings and travel speeds to what the crop conditions can allow, adding farmers should take notice of the impact that making the wrong settings on their equipment can cause.