John Deere tests its new X9 combine harvester in New Zealand, pushing the machine through demanding conditions and comparing its performance to what northern European farmers face. The video documents how the harvester handles different crop types and climates in real-world testing.
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 frosts 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 used the time to do some out of crop measurements in regards of shoe print 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 Deere coming here and testing this machine on our farm. And it's been really, really good to see it going alongside the other machines. So twisting the 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.
