I/we did a good job!

I combined some corn for a 'neighbor' last week.Their usual BT(f)O custom guy with a big 12 row Caterpillar never showed up.Anyway,the 'costomer'/neighbor told me that me and the old 95 did a way better job than the other guy!Looks like I now have a new costomer/client!Kinda makes me proud......You can have bigger and newer,but you just cant beat a good old 95! Steve

Tell me about it the neighbor's son custom cuts with a new JD I have never seen a dirty sample in corn or beans and blowing crop out the back my old massey products a lot cleaner sample it may old and slower bot i never got docked for F.M.

One of the BFO's near my sister's farm leased 3 Cat combines and hired so retired guys from town to run them. Guess nobody bothered to check them and set them (or maybe that's the way they are anyway?).

They sure threw a lot of grain out the back; those fields really got green after harvest. Guess nobody was minding the business.

Its amazing how the old 95s hold there own compared to the new ones. They maybe a little slower but they sure do have a cleaner bin of grain to show for it and that's the name of the game. Bigger aint all ways better. Funny how things work out sometimes in your favor when someone else screws up. Kudos on a job well done and for future work. Bandit

That's good to hear. Corn I assume? Not knocking you or anybody but I've run JD 55s and 95s all the way up to JD's latest offering the S670. The new machines can do just as good as job as the old ones, just got to know how to set them. There will be times when one machine will out perform the other and vice versa. Problem I find with older machines like the JD 5 series, unless you have a late one with the variable speed cylinder drive, its hard to fine tune them.

A cat can do a good job of saving grain. They do damage corn a little more because of their aggressiveness. I've been around them for six or seven years now. A bad operator can make any combine do a bad job.

My old 105 produced a clean sample of undamaged corn. Loss out the back was very minimal at full fan. One year maybe 20 years ago I planted a DeKalb number that yielded like crazy but was real light. It was weighing from 48-51 pounds. I went into it with the 105 with full air blowing through the cleaning shoe like always and I'll have to admit I wasn't too attentive to what was going out the back. All I was concerned with was a clean sample. Well I was blowing the corn out like crazy in some locations in the field but in other locations it wasn't going out the back at all. After harvest I raked up the stalks and had a neighbor come with his round baler to roll it up. With the ground bare he could see a bunch of corn on the ground and he happened to be the windiest farmer in the county. He let all the neighbors know how bad my combine was. I couldn't convince him the combine was OK. It was the guy sitting in the seat, me, who wasn't doing a good job. Jim

I run a JD 96 pull type for my oats and I get a nice clean sample with it and didn't have really any regrowth of oats were I dropped the windrows of straw. We're as the bto's had thrown over so much that the regrowth were the straw windrows were looked like they actually had seeded them down! I have actually seen some of the bto's regrowth get so tall they actually went out and cut it and baled it for hay! I will say that my $500 shed kept 96 that was headed for scrap was well worth it.

I worked with a man one time that said he was over the harvest on a big church farm and guys had all kinds of newer combines and a one 95 and the 95 was doing a better job I think the real secret to combining is the operator

My Dad ran Gleaners and we harvested my Mom's brothers/father's crops. My Granddad liked John Deere stuff and liked to tell the story of a neighbor who once ran Gleaners doing some custom work and did not do too good of a job saving the grain. He blamed the Gleaners and switched to Deeres. My thought was that if they had been paying attention to what the were doing and checked to see how the machines were separating they could have adjusted them to save the grain the way my dad did. I sure wouldn't have been telling my neighbors I was too poor of an operator to set and run a combine correctly. They all will do a good job if set and run correctly, the operator makes the difference.

It's crazy how much carryover and header loss there is in a corn field today. The big hogs are all about gettig it done in a HURRY! My dad always took the time to fine tune his machine...getting off the combine when unloading nearly every time to check the back for carryover and to listen for anything that didn't sound quite right. His theory about a clean sample was that too many weed seeds were getting back in the field if the field had weeds to start with. He'd rather take a dock at the elevator than be spreading the weed seeds back over the field.

Dad always said, "Anybody can be a driver, but only someone with know-how and skill can be an operator!" Being an operator is someone who cares to do the best job possible by taking the time needed to make adjustments. To me it's all about pride; my wife's grandfather used to brag that he could 'starve a chicken' behind his old IH303 combine! Farms were smaller then and he was patient...a couple things that aren't the way things are today.

Enough of my rant...
Tyler in IL

My view from the other end of the supply chain. I have been hauling corn screenings from the Kalama, Washington grain terminal steady for 3 weeks. They get unit trains of corn off BNSF to load on ships for export. Sure getting some dirty corn, can't hardly keep up hauling the screenings away. Most of it is going to Foster Farms chickens. My thought was there must be some BTOs that just run the combines as hard as they can and don't pay attention to how good a job they are doing.