New Holland celebrates 60th Anniversary of self-propelled forage harvester

Sep 09, 2021

New Holland Agriculture celebrates the 60th anniversary of its first forage harvester, transforming its legendary model 818 pull-type forage harvester into a self-propelled machine known as the 818 Crop Cruiser. Since then, New Holland has been at the forefront of forage harvesting with a host of pioneering industry firsts that have revolutionized the sector.

New Holland is marking this important milestone with a 60th Anniversary Special Edition of its FR Forage Cruiser for all units produced for the next season. The machines will bear a distinctive 60th Anniversary decal to symbolize the machine’s advanced technologies and exceptional performance.

Henrik Aaskov Hansen, Global Product Manager for New Holland Self Propelled Forage Harvesters, said: “For the last 60 years, New Holland forage harvesters have constantly pushed the boundaries of performance, delivering the highest quality silage to meet the most demanding requirements of livestock farmers. More recently, our FR Forage Cruisers have also proven invaluable assets in biomass production, which is developing fast in response to the growing demand for sustainable fuels. As we mark this important milestone, New Holland Forage Harvesters are demonstrating how their versatility is helping our customers to improve their profitability and fully grasp the opportunities of new revenue streams.”

FR Forage Cruiser: ultimate versatility, productivity and crop quality

New Holland’s forage harvesters deliver crop quality and throughput with no compromise. The proven Power CruiseTM features ensure ultimate capacity in fields of varying crop density, while the state-of-the-art headers power through grass, corn and whole crop.

The FR Forage Cruiser can be relied on for industry-leading chopping performance with features such as HydroLoc™ technology that ensures constant chop length regardless of crop type and variations in load, and the exceptionally strong cutterhead with a wide range of configurations to match every need – from conventional or shredded silage to biomass.

The FR Forage Cruiser leverages advanced technologies to deliver the best quality silage for livestock feed and biomass plants alike. These include the industry leading ActiveLOCTM technology, which automatically calibrates the chop length to ensure the most nutritious silage depending on the actual moisture of every individual swath. The award-winning NutriSenseTM NIR sensor nutrient analysis technology provides valuable crop nutrient data collected by the forage harvester, which can be visualized on the MyPLM Connect portal, helping farmers make informed decisions to market their crops most profitably, and tailor inputs for enhanced future yields.

The FR Forage Cruiser also offers all the advantages of New Holland’s MyPLM Connect telematics, which keeps the farmer connected to the machine at all times, enabling them to send and receive real-time information that helps operate more efficiently, productively and profitably.

Brad Wenger, Product Marketing Manager for Self Propelled Forage Harvesters, New Holland North America, said: “Precision technology solutions on our current FR Forage Cruiser have evolved greatly from the pull-type forage harvester allowing the operator to control a wide range of parameters on the machine to produce high quality silage. Whether the crop is for livestock, biogas, or even hemp production, the FR Forage Cruiser allows customers to fuel their business with the optimal crop quality and precision data across all applications. The NIR technology provides a granular measurement of key nutritional values to support a profitable and sustainable forage business.”

Source : CNH Industrial

Video: The 15-Year Bet Behind Every New Variety!

Canada is trying to decide how much agricultural research capacity it can afford to lose. Brian Rossnagel believes the better question is whether the country can afford to rebuild it.

The longtime barley and oat breeder makes the case with a simple fact about his profession: the consequences of today’s decisions may not become visible for 10 or 15 years.

“Pick the right parents. That’s the biggest thing,” Rossnagel says. “If you pick the wrong parents, you’re not going to get anywhere—and you don’t know that until 10 years, 15 years later.”

That warning carries particular weight as Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada moves to reduce spending and streamline parts of its science operations. The department’s 2026–27 plan anticipates the loss of approximately 665 positions by 2028–29 and says some research will be reduced where capacity exists in academia or industry. AAFC says the changes will make its science operations more cost-effective over the long term.

For Canada’s seed industry, Rossnagel’s career illustrates what is at stake.

This fall, the retired University of Saskatchewan breeder will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. During his 35-year career at the Crop Development Centre, he helped develop more than 100 barley and oat varieties, including CDC Austenson—one of Western Canada’s most widely grown feed barleys. His induction recognizes not only those varieties, but the collaboration and research system that made them possible.

Rossnagel is quick to emphasize that none of it was the work of one person.

“The first thing I thought about was all the other people who contributed to whatever success I and my program had over the years,” he says. “We know that it’s not an individual who does this. It’s a group—a team.”

That team extends well beyond the breeder whose name appears beside a variety. It includes technicians, pathologists, quality specialists, statisticians, regional testing sites, seed growers and industry partners. It also includes the breeders who came before and those who will carry the germplasm forward.

CDC Fraser barley, for example, moved through three breeding careers. Its parents came from Brian Harvey’s program. Rossnagel advanced the material after Harvey retired, and Aaron Beattie later guided it through registration and release.

That kind of handoff is normal in plant breeding. The person who makes the original cross may never see the resulting variety reach farmers.

It also explains why lost research capacity cannot simply be switched back on when budgets improve.

“If you shut it off, it’s very, very difficult—and particularly costly—to start it up again,” Rossnagel says. “If you have to start from scratch, it’s going to be at least 10 years before anybody notices whether you’re getting anything done or not.”

The concern is not simply how many experimental lines Canada can process. Modern equipment, statistical tools and genetic technologies allow today’s breeding programs to evaluate tens of thousands of lines—far more than Rossnagel could handle when he entered the field in the early 1970s.

But efficiency and automation do not generate every idea.

“If you pare back down, and instead of having six or seven individual scientists concentrating on wheat breeding, you go down and say three people could handle all this, well, that’s half the ideas gone,” he says. “Particularly if you happen to lose the three people who had the really neat and innovative ideas, boy, that’s a problem.”

It is a timely distinction for Canadian agriculture. Consolidating programs may preserve the volume of material moving through a system, at least initially. It may not preserve the diversity of thinking, regional knowledge or willingness to pursue unconventional crosses.

That regional knowledge matters because Canadian agriculture is not one uniform production environment. A variety suited to southern Alberta may face different disease, moisture and maturity pressures than one grown in Manitoba, Ontario or Atlantic Canada.

“Agriculture is applied biology,” Rossnagel says. “Biology, all around the Earth, moves from the poles to the equator. It does not move from Newfoundland to B.C. like politics do.”