Russell Gore, a Scottish agricultural contractor, tests John Deere's new 7R330 tractor and its reactive steering system. He explains how the tractor handles his farming operation and praises the dealer support that keeps downtime minimal.
The reactive steering does make a big difference. I'm Russell Gore. I come from Scotland, where agricultural contractors run the operation. Along with my wife, we have roughly 16 employees at the moment, but that rises quite significantly coming into the spring and summer. Biggest tractor is a 7R330 that we have, which does mainly heavy draft work. And it's a brilliant machine. It's a good tractor workworth. What we generally do is we're a big grassland area, so we do a lot of silage. So we have a lot of sets of triple mowers. And the bigger tractors, the 215s, really work them sometimes. The 330 is on it as well. Coming here and driving the new upgraded 7R, I would say the steering is a big key component. And the1 the 7R we have, if we've got too much ballast in the front of the tractor, it is quite difficult to steer. So the bigger hydraulic rams are put in the new 7R here, and the reactive steering does make a big difference. One of the reasons that we have John Deere machinery back at home is really the dealership, the backup. Our dealer Montgomery's, is very good. They're about 30 miles from our base, but we get servicing, you know, within half an hour, we can have a mechanic on the farm to do any stuff that needs sorted out. So now the dealer backup was a very significant part because if we have any downtime at all, that's a huge cost to us. So we've got to keep downtime to an absolute minimum. And if our John Deere and John Deere dealers can help us with that, that is a key reason to stick with John Deere.
