|
||
 |
|
||
|
Gene and his oldest son, Lance, are partners in Allen Harvesting Company, headquartered in Jud, North Dakota. The harvesting season for the Allen crew begins in May in Cookietown, Oklahoma, near the Texas border. From May until November, Gene, Lance, his 12-man crew, and both families, harvest winter wheat in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota and barley, field peas, soybeans, canola, spring wheat and flax in North Dakota. Along the way, they harvest grain for their main accounts (many who have used their service for years) plus other customers. "We have six New Holland CR960 combines, lots of different kinds of headers, a trailer for each combine, and three 1,100 bushel grain carts we use to haul grain away," he explains. "We have 12-14 semi's: some exclusively move equipment and some exclusively move grain. And we have four travel trailers that our families and crew live in when we're on harvest and pick-ups to pull them. We try to have enough work scheduled so we never have to look for work. I've been at this for 30 years and I know a lot of people and people contact me now." Fleet of CR combines Custom cutters pile up hours and acres fast, so dependable, efficient equipment is critical. Because Gene says today's business profits are so razor thin, any downtime adversely affects his bottom line. At first, Gene wasn't interested in a New Holland combine. "Then the local dealer persuaded me to come in and look at one. I looked and looked at it. I talked with my son, Lance, and said there were a lot of things right about the inside of this combine. So I bought them without ever running one. Never demo'd one. Just looked at it, understood the way it works and thought New Holland addressed a lot of problems." Superior threshing
"The next thing is the self-leveling shoes. Our ground is rolling and the people we service in the South have terraces so we constantly have that combine leaning from one side to the other. The self-leveling shoe allows us to do that kind of work without any grain running along side the combine and escaping. "And the third thing, and probably as important as anything in the combine, is the return system. The return with the little spike tooth concave cylinder on the bottom of what they call the roto-thresher is threshing anything that doesn't get threshed the first time through the machine and is then being deposited back on the grain pan rather than in the concave. It doesn't create that re-routing of grain through the concave. If it didn't get threshed the first time, the chances of it getting threshed there the second time are pretty small. So you get a circulation effect, where the grain keeps circling through the combine. With the New Holland system, it's roto-threshed at the re-thresher and is dumped back on the grain pan for separation. It allows that to occur without dumping back into the concave where you create a wear area. In other models as the concave wears, the problem of unthreshed grain increases. The result of this is increased maintenance and cost to keep these other threshing systems operating satisfactorily. The New Holland design has eliminated the problem allowing for longer concave life, less cost, less service and happier customers. "Then we have to have lots of different kinds of headers. The big advantage we have with the New Holland draper heads is that we're able to cut grain and soybeans with the same head. When I made the change I traded in 31 heads and replaced them with 15. Now the maintenance issue is a lot easier for us to manage. When you have 31 heads lying on the ground, you can work on those virtually 100% of the time. Our workload is a lot less because we have decreased our header needs by so much." Best-kept secret "The CR combine is probably the best-kept secret in the industry. Guys in my business tend to run the same equipment year after year because they know it: they know how to service it and they know how to operate it. And some of them are afraid to step outside their comfort zone. But, as we consistently do a nicer job in the field, a nicer job in the grain tank, and we deliver a better product to the elevator, this combine creates a comfortable feeling in the operator's seat with less stress because you don't have to worry about field loss and grain quality. "We're consistently among the best in grain quality, and I mean not by 10%, not by 5%, but in the top 2% of the samples of grain we delivered. People I know in the elevator business consistently tell us this is the nicest sample they've seen. In fact, we've just taken on another job because of word of mouth.' Gene says, "We have Terrain Tracer™ on every combine and it's necessary for soybeans where we're right on the ground. But we've done things just a little differently. We've started utilizing a draper head to do soybeans although it's not as important with a draper head as it is with just a regular flex bar. The reason for that is the draper head has an adaptor that allows the header to float inside that adaptor. But with the Terrain Tracer it always keeps your adaptor centered on your head, so even though your head is flexing in your adaptor it always stays centered, whereas if you don't have a Terrain Tracer it won't. So that adaptor becomes the most important thing and the Terrain Tracer is secondary on the draper head." For the Allen family, harvesting is a family affair. His wife and children have traveled with him throughout the years. Gene recalls, "My sons, Lance and Kyle, and daughters, Bobbi and Wendy, all ran the tractors, grain carts, combines and semi's. My daughters have CDL's. Kyle took care of the combines, Lance took care of the trucks and I handled the crises. "Today, Lance is a partner in the business, Bobbi is finishing law school, Kyle is pursuing a doctorate in medicinal research and Wendy is in medical school at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Our youngest boys, Luke, age 11, and Garth, age 13, are becoming acquainted with CR960s as they grow up. Lance's children, Elizabeth, age 10 and Cooper, age 3, travel and help as much as they can. Over the years, I've told many people that life is not about money. You know, we've kept our family together working on a daily basis. A lot of people chase that dollar so hard that they lose sight of what is more important."
|
