I never owned a Deere, but used to hire cutters that ran them. I can tell you what I found with harvesting wheat. The 9600 Deeres with 30' headers seemed to be decent machines in everything up to 45 bpa wheat. At that point, the machines capacity to cut and swallow the crop started to overwhelm the straw-walkers and loss over the walkers began. At 60 bpa it was a big problem, and lack of discipline by the operators resulted in excessive losses. I also noticed that any conventional will leave a few kernels in the butt of the heads if it starts to get the least bit tough in the evenings or if you start too early in the mornings. While the 9600 produced a decent sample, it wasn't even quite as good as my Gleaner l2 did in the same crop. I rented an R62 for a while, bought an R50, and eventually traded for an R72. Walker loss goes completely away with the rotary. We cut 90+ bpa wheat @ 1300+ bu._hour and you were hard pressed to find anything behind the machine. The rotary does a much better job threshing when the straw is tough and the sample is much, much cleaner. The accelerator rolls and air blast really cleans things up. There is a sweet spot for settings on the machine that is very wide. I've gone for two years now without changing any setting on the machine. I guess the best advice that I could give you is to get a bigger auger or more trucks. An R62 should bury a 9500, and if you don't upgrade your grain handling system, that will become the bottleneck. Ed in Montana
