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2024 NFMS snapshot: New Holland’s CR11 combine debuts in U.S.

New Holland’s new flagship combine, the 775-hp CR11, was redesigned from the ground up to lean more heavily into productivity and power efficiency. The new model made its North American debut at the 2024 National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville.

New Holland said it tailored the new combine in anticipation of how harvesting demands will continue to evolve. Because of how higher-yielding crops and unpredictable weather can affect both this season’s crop and the next, New Holland engineers aimed to design a machine that can clear fields quickly to protect the quality while ensuring the following year’s crop establishment can occur in good time and conditions.

About 90 percent of the machine is new components, and New Holland said it had to rethink everything to get to this capacity. It will do 20 percent to 40 percent more than the already robust CR10.90, which is the current flagship.

“This machine is not just a refresh of our CR10.90, which is in its own league and still the world record holder for wheat harvest. The CR11 is a totally new design,” said Curtis Hillen, combine marketing manager for New Holland Agriculture North America. “It’s a new platform that New Holland is going to build off of for the next level of productivity in twin-rotor combines.”

More productivity, maximum grain savings, premium residue management, and enhanced uptime are the four pillars the CR11 combine is built on. All four pillars support the machine’s overall objective to reduce the total cost of harvesting, a combination of financial cost and time that, when optimized, results in the overall improvement of the farmer’s bottom-line profitability. For example, it has 25 percent fewer drive components, and all drive chains have been eliminated.

It features a 775-horsepower C16 engine, 2-by-24-inch rotors (which is larger than what the CR10.90 had), 567-bushel grain tank, and a 6 bushels per second unload rate.

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Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators