A view from outside the U.S.A ; The U.S. corn belt, with it's immense area of extraordinarly fertile soils and it's very high yielding, high volume output can probably justify the development of much greater capacity machines. In Europe different conditions apply again which requires a different type of capacity to corn capacity. In many of the rest of the world's grain producing areas, the class 7 combines are big enough. A lot of grain crops in these areas are quite low yielding compared to corn or have very considerable cultural problems in adopting very large machinery, i.e. small land holdings and the need to employ their population and a lack of individuals able to finance the purchase of these machines. Our own problem with a R62 is that we run out of power to push the combine in ground speed. We seldom run out of capacity. Outside of the Great Plains of which I have only seen the northern areas, around Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin and others and around Winnepeg, the one area that has the potential to beat the Great Plains in extent, soils and crop production is the black earth areas of the Ukraine and the north Caucus region of Russia, which I have also seen. As the farmers of these regions catch up in technology, these immensely fertile areas may eventually be able to use the very large class 8,9 or higher capacity combines, but not for many years to come. Cheers!
