John Deere's X9 combine harvester tackles the challenge of harvesting 1000 tonnes of grain in a single day. The team navigates operator fatigue, weather delays, and grain logistics while testing automation features designed to keep the machine running at peak efficiency.
Brother versus brother. One goes in the S series, one goes in the X Series. I'd like to see an average of 60 ton an hour. 69% was X series capacity over the S. Very impressive machine. It's unreal. The X Series is exceptional.
I got pretty excited when I first heard this. You know, the funnest part of the job is being in the cab. So this challenge was going to give me a bit of seat time, bit of stick time. I knew there's going to be a lot of work leading up to it, but nothing better than spending time on farm with good customers. And in the cab, in the machine, which is a pleasure to drive. Harvest time is the culmination of a full year of work. It's the best part of farming is.
When you actually see all the hard.
Work put into it. That's what you farm for.
We went harvesting to go farming and we just. Yeah, it's a real buzz to go harvesting. I know you really gotta get it. It gets your adrenaline going, you know.
Headers are the biggest, biggest machine. One of the biggest machines we make at John Deere. You know, who doesn't want to drive a new machine that's the best in class and do the best job we can.
So do you think possible we're gonna grind. Keeping grain away is gonna to be the struggle, but early 20s in temperature, so it'll be, it'll be tough. Yeah. But tomorrow is really the only shot we've got to get it right.
So the X9 was a brand new design from Deere and I guess it was sort of focused on two key points. It was capacity and efficiency. And obviously with capacity we've got a bigger machine. It's wider, it's a little bit longer, more threshing, more separating, more cleaning, more grain handling and a little bit more power.
It's also efficient in terms of its power use. So the factory has done a lot of work in making it do more tonnes per hour, but using less fuel.
To do it, to maximise the productivity of the operator and also the fatigue of that operator. So the X9 has a lot of harvest automation features built into it. So machine Sync enables the X9 to take control of the tractor and match its ground speed. So. So we're maximising the speed of the harvester and we're not really beholden to what that chaser bin is doing.
We've had auto track in all our machines for a long time now.
So rather than the operator manually steering the machine on the end turn, it will automatically turn around itself. These are all things that are going to just give you that extra 1% at the end of the day that you're looking for with your harvest.
When we do demos with, with x9s, things start all right, but then the trucks all start filling up and the silos fill up and all of a sudden the combine's got to stop in the paddock because they can't keep the grain away from it.
All right, guys, we need to. Yeah. Talk about strategy for tomorrow. We're not going to have any mother bin, are we? We're only going to have trucks, so.
We may have a mother bin, but.
But we'll have two chaser bins.
Two chasers.
So even with trucks without a mother bin, two chaser bins, hopefully. As long as there's always a truck.
There is a double bin, two semis. With 1,000 tonnes to harvest, we had three challenges to tackle. Driver fatigue, keeping the grain away and crop conditions. The strength of the X9's automation features really play into our favour. To keep the drivers on the game to handle the grain, we chose to cut big blocks and always turn left, so the auger was always on the outside ready for the chaser bins to come and grab us at any time. We had our chaser bins unloading directly into mother bins to make sure they could get back out to us quicker. In the X9, we needed the moisture to come down below 13% to start our harvest. The earlier this happens in the day, the better chance we have of harvesting a thousand tonnes tomorrow. The weather should be on our side. Not too hot, not too windy, so the fire band should be off our back. And with no rain on the forecast, things are looking good today.
Conditions are not real good. High humidity, cloud, cloudy, no sun. It's not the best. Well, today is the day. Today is the day. First three things for the day is safety, safety and safety. So getting to a thousand tons is going to be a real challenge, but the last thing I want people to do is push themselves too hard trying to get there.
The priority today is don't let the X9 stop.
All right? As I said, you know, enjoy it and let's go get it done.
Safe.
Get it done and be safe. Yep. Two trucks should keep up and then be able to go into town all day.
Chase have been.
Drivers are going to have to talk.
You obviously don't want to be unloading all the time. Traffic and the chase have been run off sprayer tracks. They wanted to chase again. We're going to start in 10 minutes.
10 minutes.
Coming down here was always in the back of my mind that we may not do anything. It might just get too wet.
We're just waiting for, I suppose.
Yeah. The weather's not really paying its part. I think it's showtime. I think we're ready to go. We're going to run a sample in, but I think we're good.
I'm confident the machine can do it. I really am confident that it can do a thousand tons in a day. No worries at all. I think the. The big challenge is we've got to get it down below 13 and a half. So before we can start, that was showing 12.9.
We've got to be 13, so they just want to double check that we're good to go and then we'll be right.
So, you know, can we have a big enough window before it, you know, at the end of the end of the evening before it comes back up again? That's probably. Is that window big enough to get it done? Go, mate. Put it on.
I'm excited.
Dry grain.
12.5.
4.5. Do it. Hell, yeah. If this was. This was easy, we wouldn't be here, would we? It was easy to get a thousand tonnes, we wouldn't be here. Talking about. It's meant to be hard, it's meant to be a challenge and I think that's why we're here. So I'm pretty confident we can get it done, see Mother Nature on our side.
It's been nearly 12 months into planning.
Looking good. Looking really good.
We're going to do it. We're going to easily do it.
All hands on deck. It is achievable. But getting tougher. Just that, like a dot of oil, like hydraulic leaking oil.
