Combines to answer the last two posts rumor las vegas

As always, a joy to read your post Tbran

Sure am glad that there are no small farmers left that need class 5 machines and only a few who need class 6. Guess I'm out of the picture and don't even know it. will the last small farmer turn out the lights when you leave please..Agco has wrote us off already. Bob

Sounds like the best of both worlds if you ask me. Can you tell us anything about the new flex headIJ Will the draper just be a rebadged one like it is now or a completely in-house designIJ

Thanks tbran. The new concept certainly sounds like creating a very interesting and potentially very high capacity machine. But as brassring says there are a lot of us out there that cannot afford and can barely justify a class 7 machine, let alone a class 8,9 and up. This certainly applies to, by north American standards, the very small Australian market. Australia has large areas but low yields over much of it's grain belt. A very tiny area of corn is grown under irrigation. Most grain farms range from about 2000 acres of crop in the higher yielding areas on up to 20 to 30,000 acres in the low yielding areas with a lot around the 5 to 12000 acre crop area. Yields are around the 60 bushell _ acre in the good areas down to about 20 to 30 bushels an acre in the lower yielding regions. Enormous capacity is nice but not always needed by aussie farmers. Speed, ruggedness and big widths are needed. AGCO, like most corporations will probably sell the designs and rights of the small Gleaners to some other small corporate outfit. Ten years later they will wonder where the hell the new competitor came from so fast. Read "Rolf's" true story in a previous post a couple of weeks ago " Rumour mill rumbles on" about a big accountancy firm in Melbourne, Victoria, who sold off their small clients to other companies because there was no profit in them and then, in a few years had to buy a lot of other accountancy firms to try and rebuild their rapidly declining client base. Some of those sold off small clients had become big clients for the other firms. The big accountancy firm never made it. They were taken over and are out of business. A very salutary lesson to big corporations. look after the little guy because one day, just possibly, he and a some of his mates may be a very big guys indeed. Cheers!

I don't think anyone has written anyone "off". It is just the nature of the beast. Companies must plan, devlelope plans, contingency plans, finacial plans, personell plans, and on and on. They must use inputs that are available. These inputs are what they are from the sources that have proven credible. When someone like AGCO goes into a bank review meeting for MIllIONS of dollars, the banker doesn't want to hear, well we think,,, or the market says x but we are going a different direction with your millions.... they must always look to the future, the competition, credible research sources and yes the farmers to make plans. We make a point to stress that our position is let us not let the machinery mfgs drive the market ahead of the customer base and thus force the migration to the BTO's who are a pain in the rear to deal with. As a rule the more unqualified the operators the exponetially greater the service calls and owner dissatisfaction and thus the less productivity and ROI. I know for a fact the point of diminishing returns on scope of opperations has been surpassed by some of our area operations.....

Well, it is no secret that heads over 30+ feet really need to bend in the middle kind of like flex wing Bush Hogs rightIJ Header augers will not flex, therefore maybe a draper system in a flex headIJ The problems that must be overcome is wear, dirt build up, crop flow and a bunch of other things. I am not saying this will be the future as there are real problems to overcome, but would not a 40' flex head that folds up for transport and doesn't need lateral tilt to stay on the ground be niceIJ Some tweaks to the current flex head would be nice as well. like full finger augers as an option for those who need it added to a reel change and improved sickle drive for those really wide headsIJ. As with everything I have posted here let me put in a disclaimer, everything is subject to change and we dealers and even most'in the know' company people never know the end result. We are told enough to be dangerous. Those who are 'in the know' do not talk. Many projects are scrapped just before hitting the assy line even after big bucks have been invested in RandD. It is just the nature of the beast.

You boys worry too much Hyperize the machines we have and we can run for years. I have a M3 4400hrs I can run a 16 ft head 40 bu_acr beans at 4.5 mph thoose r 60 70 ought to do even more . Use the ones we have better and more effeiciently and they will last a lifetime.

tbran, I will confess that when I hear and see the lack of maintenance and the way in which some farmers and operators treat their machines and and the table thumping demands that these same operators usually make from their dealers I often marvel at the dealers fortitude and patience. I wonder even more, who in the hell would want to be an Ag machinery manufacturer with the uncountable ways that a machine can be abused and misused and then the dealer and the manufacturer get the blame for a supposedly poorly designed machine. like farmers, dealers and manufacturers must be masochists. Cheers!

The masochist said to the sadist, beat me, the sadist said, ,,,, no.... its a life. We have good days and bad days. It is a lot like coaching a pro football or basketball team, (employees are the players, the company is the drafted hot shot players that come along you count on for the big wins, the owner is the banker and the other dealers are the other teams) when everything comes together you win, when it doesn't - the banker replaces the coach .....

You have a valid point. We must all be wary of the ' Charge of the light Brigade ' mentality. We may have to utilize the 'used combine center' which is agco's effort to make available reconditioned, performance guaranteed used units at a price that is not cheap, but a big percentage less than new.