John and an engineer test combines in New Zealand, discussing machine performance across different crop types and harvest conditions. They focus on how the machinery handles residue management in the country's geographic and seasonal variations.
So we're in New Zealand for testing here. Obviously combines are a seasonal product and we've got long design cycles which are depending on the harvest seasons. So if we not only test on northern hemisphere, but also include southern hemisphere like Brazil, Australia and now New Zealand here. So in New Zealand we have very similar conditions to what we find in Europe, especially in northern Europe, in UK, northern France, northern Germany, etc. So we find tough straw conditions, high yields. We found really tough grassy conditions here, very high moisture, so that's tough on the separator. After grass seed we moved into oilseed rape and also in oilseed grape. We hit a crop which was 2.2 to 2.4 meter tall. We had yields of 6 tons plus, so also very high oilseed grape yields. And now we moved into barley. So some winter barley or summer barley. And now we are testing winter wheat.
The climate here would be more milder than England, certainly in winter, hotter and drier in summer. Our rainfall here would be around in about 600 mil a year. Because we do get frost very rarely snow, we more or less get growth all the year through the winter.
So since the machine was shipped out, we updated the design and what we are doing right now is to get that to the latest iteration. We use the time to do some out of crop measurements in regards of shoot pressure to validate different design configurations.
Straw management here starts when the combine goes through the crop. We need a good chop and spread system on the back of the combine. The short chop length of straw is ideal because it rots down quicker. Distribute it back over the width of the cut of the combine so that it's not a problem. Then for the following crop we try and harvest our wheat at 14.5% moisture and under which is the regulation for acceptance into the grain stores around here. Grain quality is very important to me as we don't want too much extraneous matter in the grain and we don't want chipped grains either. I find it really interesting, John are coming here and testing this machine on our farm and it's been really good to see it going alongside the other machines.
So twisting this straw here, you can see it's really tough here in the lower part still. So the soil is still wet and you still feel the moisture in here and also a lot of fiber. So it's half straw. So it's comparable to northern Europe I would say. So this is the window weed we have here. It's yielding about 12 to 13 tons in that range. Freshing is not super tough but it's tougher than it would typically be in uk, Northern France, northern Germany conditions.
So today we're optimizing grain tank cleanliness. So we've been taking samples of clean grain in the tank and separating out the heavy mog, the light mog, and then also taking tailings, catches and understanding what type of or what percentage of free grain we have in the tailings.
So yesterday we did a lot of residue, so investigated in spread patterns and we also figured out we've got something to do on the grain tank sample. We've got some white caps in there, so we need to investigate in the concave settings, etc.
We tested different sets of shrouds to have different spreading width and today we are making new set of shrouds out of these learnings.
We are checking the residue distribution so chopping quality is really good even in this tougher condition here. And now we are checking how well we can distribute the residue over the cutting width, how even it is and how wide we can throw and also how well we can compensate side width. I'm really happy with the chop quality. That looks really good.
