The ELITE 30 pre­ci­sion planter for the Brazil­ian mar­ket

With Ludovic Tetard, Pro­ject Man­ag­er R&D, 
Kuhn Group, Sav­erne (France)

Ludovic Tetard has been with Kuhn Group since 2001, includ­ing 13 years at Kuhn do Brasil in Pas­so Fun­do. Today, as a plant­ing and seed­ing tech­nol­o­gy group lead­er at Kuhn Group in Sav­erne, he empha­sis­es the impor­tance of good com­mu­ni­ca­tion with Kuhn Group’s tech­nol­o­gy spe­cial­ists across the var­i­ous con­ti­nents for the suc­cess­ful intro­duc­tion of the ELITE 30 large-area pre­ci­sion planter. Direct con­tact with farm­ers, who under­stand the real­i­ties and chal­lenges in the field, is also key to suc­cess.

Ludovic Tetard: “To achieve an even faster and bet­ter-coor­di­nat­ed launch for such a com­plex and ambi­tious prod­uct, we set up a ded­i­cat­ed pro­ject team in Pas­so Fun­do, Brazil, with peo­ple from prod­uct engi­neer­ing, pro­cess engi­neer­ing, mar­ket­ing, and pur­chas­ing.”

Close up of the soy bean plant

Farmer Paulo Gio­vanio Pin­to: “Having the Kuhn team here in Brazil with boots on the ground and eager to lis­ten to us made it easy for us to have an open dis­cus­sion about what we real­ly need and think as farm­ers, today and in the future.”

Ludovic Tetard: “Dur­ing the devel­op­ment of the ELITE 30 pre­ci­sion planter, we vis­it­ed poten­tial cus­tomers in dif­fer­ent regions to gain rel­e­vant field insights and pro­vide hands-on expe­ri­ence for us, and ben­e­fits for our cus­tomers.”

Paulo Gio­vanio Pin­to: “When we saw the impres­sive size of the ELITE 30 in the field, equipped with the best tech­nol­o­gy on the mar­ket and with an attrac­tive design, we imme­di­ate­ly felt very con­fi­dent about the out­come and sim­ply knew that this would be the machine of choice for us.”

The ELITE 30 large-area pre­ci­sion planter made its first pub­lic appear­ance in April 2024 at Agr­ishow in São Paulo, the largest agri­cul­tur­al show in Brazil. It received very pos­i­tive feed­back from cus­tomers and com­peti­tors alike, set­ting a new stan­dard in tech­nol­o­gy, oper­abil­i­ty, over­all qual­i­ty, and design.

A num­ber of the first ELITE 30s are cur­rent­ly being used by cus­tomers in Brazil. In the near future, Kuhn Group plans to devel­op machines of dif­fer­ent sizes based on the ELITE 30 con­cept to meet the diverse needs of cus­tomers in the Brazil­ian mar­ket.