Changing the Face of Harvesting

On July 10, 2002, the first New Holland CR Twin Rotor® combine – a CR960 with a 12-row corn header – rolled out of a mist and stopped center stage in front of a live audience at the New Holland North American Dealer Meeting in  St. Louis. It changed the face of combine harvesting forever.

When the special effects fog cleared, what dealers saw looked like nothing they – nor the world – had ever seen. Here was a futuristic bright yellow machine with high-performance race car styling and curved, swept-back lines, large steel gull-wing side shields, a glossy finish and the most spacious full-visibility cab ever on a combine.

Then an unseen narrator began to run down every harvester’s wish list: longer rotors, an engine with increased power up to 370 horsepower, an advanced stone protection system, the largest cleaning system in the industry, the first self-leveling cleaning system on a rotary combine, intuitive controls and the fastest unloading rate at 3 bushels per second. 

While these specs may not seem amazing by today’s standards, 20 years ago they were revolutionary. More importantly, here was a machine built to be future proof with both a timeless design and a platform capable of incorporating rapidly changing technology without skipping a beat. The first CR Series combines leap-frogged over the competition.

Farmer input
Bringing this project to fruition required interweaving several threads into one strong multi-strand cord. While management kickstarted the project, it was the interaction of several internal and external groups that resulted in a combine line that continues to set world records and win awards of excellence.

Hugh MacMaster, project engineer, recruited the engineers who became part of the “New Gen Combine Team.” From there, focus groups were held with customers to determine what they considered most important in their next combine. 

“Once we assembled the core team of engineers, we started conducting focus groups with customers,” MacMaster says, “The engineers sat around the edge of the room, while a group of customers sat in the center. We had a facilitator who led the customers through discussions about what they wanted in their next combine.” 

“The engineers heard the customers’ unfiltered requests. What we were looking for was their wants, needs and dreams, not solutions. The engineers were responsible for coming up with the solutions.”

Two of those farmers were Dan and John Schmit, members of a multi-family, fifth-generation corn and soybean cash grain operation farming 4,000+ acres in Nebraska. Until 1992, the family’s equipment was solidly green. Then, Dan says, “We decided to look around and our local New Holland dealer brought a TR96 combine out. We ran it against the new John Deere model, and there was no comparison. The grain quality was there, and the service was excellent, so we never looked back.” 

In 1997, the Schmit family purchased a TR™98, which was the 25,000th New Holland TR Series combine to roll off the line at the Grand Island, Nebraska, plant. The family attended a special ceremony that was held at the plant to commemorate the event. Later, Dan was featured in an  advertisement for a TR99.

You could say, as New Holland combine owners go, the Schmit family is “all in.” So, when customer focus groups were taking place for the new CR combine development, the Schmits were invited to participate. 

“We met with the combine heads of engineering,”  says John. “We were in a group of probably eight farmers hand-picked to come in and talk about the good things and the bad things that we were seeing with the Twin Rotor combines. We gave a lot of very candid input. People weren’t afraid to tell them what they thought. It was amazing that the company would listen. They took notes as fast as they could write. That was a big deal. We felt that was very important if they wanted to continue to be leaders in the market.”

As work progressed on the CR combine, it became evident just how powerful the engineers’ interaction with the customers was. 

“The magic of having the engineers involved early, completely and directly is that there was a clarity of mission,” MacMaster says. “Everybody had the same mental image of what this thing was going to look like in the end and the commitment was great. We had people who would work all night at key parts of the program, then wouldn’t even go home because they were so enthused about delivering this project. This wasn’t a job anymore. It was a mission.”

Dealer input
Also critical to the development of a new product is dealer input. According to MacMaster, “The dealers bring the ability to look forward, look around the corner to where they think the market is going to go. That’s really important because there’s about a four- or five-year development time. Whatever you do now has to not only be right for the market five years from now, but it needs to have the ability to grow 10, 15 years, and in this case, 20 years after it is launched. The dealers bring that kind of perspective. The difference is that the customers told us what they needed today. The dealers were able to tell us what they needed tomorrow.”

When talking to farmers, they may say what the machine looks like is not nearly important to them as how it performs. But New Holland was designing a machine that was going to have huge benefits for farmers and getting the machine into their hands started with getting the machine noticed.

Russ Strong, an industrial stylist, was tasked with styling the CR so that, in MacMaster’s words, “It should look solid and futuristic but at the same time, functional. It’s a tough balance to have it look different but also send a message that this thing’s going to perform and it’s going to last.”

And it worked. Working alongside the engineers was the marketing group that included Gary Wojcik, who joined the combine team in 1998. Shortly after the dealer launch in  

St. Louis, demos at farm shows and dealerships began. Wojcik, who worked these events, says, “When that machine arrived at the local dealership, we wanted the styling to make people slam on their brakes as they drove by and say ‘WOW!” looks really good! Now, I want to see what it can do in my field.’”

The Schmits were among the early adopters to try out the new CR combine. John Schmit recalls at those focus group sessions he commented to the engineers that the clean grain elevator needed to be physically larger so it could clean and elevate what it could thresh. He discovered that those remarks, and many others, had indeed been addressed. 

“We went from running two machines to one and got the job done in a timely fashion. The improvement in efficiency was dramatic. And the improvement in cleaning and throughput was exponential, thanks to the then-new self-cleaning leveling shoes.  The cab was hands down the best in the industry. They put out a great product.”

Today’s CR combine
The Schmits have been trading up in CR combines every three to four years, depending on machine hours. They recently took possession of a new CR Revelation CR8.90.

What keeps customers coming back to the CR is its future-proof quality. While the shape and size of the machine has held relatively steady, the improvements “under the hood” have been substantial. Essentially the same size machine has gone from 370 horsepower to a max of 700 horsepower. Unloading rate has increased to 4.5 bushels per second. And the machine can handle heads up to 50 feet and 16 rows.

But perhaps the biggest game changer built into the first series of CRs was the integration of a CAN bus, a then-new technology. This technology dramatically improved electronic communications within vehicles. While future capabilities were unforeseen at the time, MacMaster says, “One decision that we took right from the get-go was to incorporate a CAN bus. That allowed us the flexibility to incorporate advancements in technology – sensing controls, yield mapping, all those things really come together on the combine. Subsequently it went to tillage and planters. So now you’ve got a whole integrated precision farming network, but the combine is the core because that’s where you measure the outcomes. Having that CAN bus allowed all those subsequent innovations to be easily incorporated.”

Today, one in four combines sold globally is a New Holland. And it’s no wonder. The CR Revelation combines hold the record for capacity in both wheat and soybeans. They boast best-in-class grain quality and the industry’s cleanest grain sample thanks to the unique Twin Rotor concept, which ensures in-line crop flow for gentle grain handling. Grain quality is further enhanced by award-winning features, including the Aggressive Shake and Opti-Clean™ self-leveling cleaning shoe systems with Opti-Fan™ technology. 

New Holland set the bar even higher with the IntelliSense™ combine automation system. It automatically optimizes CR Revelation combine settings every 20 seconds by choosing the best action out of 280 million possibilities to get the highest possible throughput and lowest grain loss, while allowing the operator to make fewer decisions.
So, what is the future of New Holland combines? Limitless.