“The New Holland Harvest Support Team has been there for everything we’ve needed and has given us very close attention. They actually call us more than we call them,” he says.

The Harvest Support Team stays with the custom harvest groups as they progress north all season.

Larkin has been equally impressed with the performance of the CR970. It is harvesting 25 to 30 acres an hour in standing wheat, while the CR940 is taking off 13 to 18 acres an hour. The two combines are escorted full-time by a 1,000-bushel grain cart.

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The real test

“You can get a combine to do acres per hour and brag about it, but if it doesn’t run all day, it isn’t any good. I go by acres per day. We usually anticipate harvesting 400 acres a day with the two machines. That’s the selling point,” says Larkin. “You want a combine that’s reliable and easy to work on. That’s the bottomline. If it sits, it’s not making money.”

He tries to put in a 12-hour workday. Last year, he was getting 120 to 140 acres a day. If he took off a quarter section, it was “a really big, tough day.”

“Now, we’re doing a quarter a day, and it’s an easy day,” he says. That’s counting the time required to take off the header and move to a new field – a local regulation in Oklahoma and Kansas.

With the CR970, Larkin has seen the best harvesting performance in his experience. In Oklahoma’s heavy red winter wheat, he saw yields of 65 bushels an acre. With a 39-ft. draper header, the CR970 is a hungry machine.

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“It’s quite a machine”

Savelkoul was still at home, spraying his own 7,000 acres, when he heard from one happy customer in Oklahoma where the crew had just finished taking off the crop. The report was that the two combines harvested 100,000 bushels of hard winter wheat for the client in just five days. It was yielding close to 70 bushels an acre.

Savelkoul Harvesting ran New Holland CR combines for the 2003 harvest.

“It’s quite a machine,” says Larkin. “In that heavy stuff, we had to quit right at dark because it was really humid and some of the wheat was lying down. I’d get at least 200 acres a day, that was on a short day. I’d get going at 10:00 in the morning and I’d be shutting down at 9:00 at night.” There’s just about no such thing as overloading this combine. “You never have to worry about it,” Larry says. The 22-inch twin rotors “fly through” crops and weeds. In one dirty field, heavily infested with weeds but still yielding 58 bushels, the CR970 was still moving along at 4- to 5-mph and producing a clean sample.

“I was impressed. It does a real good job. In southern Oklahoma, we were bringing in the cleanest samples.”

The other good news was the farmers weren’t finding grain left behind the combine. When the combines were back home on the Savelkoul farm, they were harvesting 90-bushel-per-acre barley in 36-foot swaths at 5.5mph with minimal loss.

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Cab comforts

During the season, which runs from mid-May to late November, the temperature outside can reach into the 100s. But Larkin says the high heat doesn’t touch the performance or the air conditioning in the New Holland cabs.

“They never overheated or ran warm. We never slowed up once, and the cab stayed cool.”

Everything is easy in the cab. When a wind comes up, Larkin just pushes a button to adjust the direction of throw for chaff and straw. Dust isn’t a problem either.

“There isn’t any dust blowing out the front,” he says. He had some problems with dust plugging the air filters and the radiator on his previous competitive machine. On the CR series, it hasn’t been an issue at all.

There’s still more that Larkin adds to his list of likes. At this point, the 370-hp Iveco engine hasn’t burned any oil, and the CR970 burns even less fuel than the CR940. It’s a smooth-running engine with “consistently more power” than he’s had before.

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Unload on the go

It doesn’t take long to fill the 330-bushel hopper on the CR970, but then, it doesn’t take long to empty it, either. Larkin unloads on the go, without changing speed, thanks to a power boost that cuts in just for that purpose. The 13-inch horizontal auger slides straight out and dumps the whole load into a grain cart, at three bushels a second, in less than two minutes. New Holland engineers have made the whole system easy for operators to maintain and clean. Taking out concaves, for instance, can be a long and tiresome task on other combines. “To get the concaves in and out, it takes about half an hour. That’s a pretty easy job on this combine,” says Larkin. Cleaning filters and changing oil is also a breeze. “They made it really easy to work on. I really like how easy it is to blow out the radiator with the onboard air compressor. And you can actually change the oil without making a mess,” he says. That onboard air compressor is also great for working with air tools.

“We usually anticipate harvesting 400 acres a day with the two machines.” —Larry Larkin

Then there’s the on-board computer. “I’m kind of computer illiterate, but I’ve gotten to like it. It’s pretty simple to figure out,” says Larkin. The computer tells him the barometric pressure. If it’s low, he figures there’s a storm coming. It tells how hard the engine is working and the percentage of its power band being used. It tells gearbox temperature, hydraulic temperature, engine oil temperature, and air temperature. And it tells the level of slope when the cleaning shoe is automatically compensating for a hillside.

Custom harvesters operating big yellow combines are not that unusual, but the CR970 Larkin operates and the CR940 that runs beside him do cause a bit of commotion.

“I sure get a lot of people talking when I pull into a field. They’ve never seen a New Holland like that before. They think it’s some other machine, until they pull up. Then they want a ride,” he says.