Jasons Posted March 22, 2012 Share Posted March 22, 2012 Hello, there was some interest in my introductoin thread about the equipment we use here in Illinois to farm so I thought I would make a thread to show you some of what we use. Since it's planting season it kind of makes sense to start in the spring. Here is our Quad track 485 pulling the Landoll 44ft VT plus model. The VT plus lays the ground down like a garden. We are ready to plant! quick picture from the cab This from a few years ago, but nothing has changed with our planting outfit. A New Holland 9384 and Kinze planter. We also use two Krause 40ft field cultivators in the spring to work ground. I aparently haven't bothered taking pictures of them in action yet. Maybe in a few days when everything dries up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jdeere6910 Posted March 22, 2012 Share Posted March 22, 2012 Thats some monster toys you've got ther jason makes our drilling kit look like a pedal tractor Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FordTractorCrazy Posted March 22, 2012 Share Posted March 22, 2012 great choice of tractors, i would love a spin around in the New Holland is that a 16-row planter i am getting curious now on what you use for harvest, or is that contracted out..? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jasons Posted March 22, 2012 Author Share Posted March 22, 2012 We have to blow ditches in all our fields to drain water because everything is so flat here. Thus this contraption. Moving on to harvest, I spend most of time in the 485 Quad Track, pulling our Kinze grain cart. This thing will hold a semi load of grain and unload it all in 3 and half minutes. It goes non stop during harvest. We run a Deere combine with a 30ft header. We are debating switching to a 40ft draper header this year. We use various tools for deep tillage depending on the crop that was on the field and soil. Here you can see our two quads on the inline rippers working some bean stubble. Corn ground is worked by the Landoll disc chisel. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jasons Posted March 22, 2012 Author Share Posted March 22, 2012 We use a drying bin at our grain site to dry down corn and beans if needed. The system is a big improvement over our old set up. The corn is augered into this bin where it is dried. As it dries down the dry corn is then blown with air to the other storage bins. We used to have to auger the dried corn out then auger it into the dry bin. This way saves us literally days of downtime in the fall. some of our bins off in the distance there with the neighbors 706 rusting a part. he still uses it though! A not so great picture of the selector which we can change to move the dry corn to which ever bin we choose. hey I found a picture of one of our field cultivators. Sorry it's a bit out of place. The date stamp is also very wrong. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jasons Posted March 22, 2012 Author Share Posted March 22, 2012 great choice of tractors, i would love a spin around in the New Holland is that a 16-row planter i am getting curious now on what you use for harvest, or is that contracted out..? Yep, that's a 16 row. We ordered a 24 row last fall to replace it, unfortunately it won't be here until this summer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FordTractorCrazy Posted March 22, 2012 Share Posted March 22, 2012 amazing kit, most of that would not even fit through the entrances of our fields in Holland.. I made quite a few trips to the North American continent and have to say it is really something to see endless fields and the huge kits that work them.. We are used to 10 acre fields on average!!!! would you be needing extra muscle for the 24-rower? (a shame that it isnt there before the planting season) btw that Kinze grain cart is Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jdc Posted March 22, 2012 Share Posted March 22, 2012 Very nice equipment you have. Do you put drains in the same place every year or move them around? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Palmer Posted March 22, 2012 Share Posted March 22, 2012 welcome to ftf,always nice to see a quadtrac working Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deere-est Posted March 22, 2012 Share Posted March 22, 2012 Lovely photos Jason, really smart machinery you run. Is it your family or a place you work at? Also, could I ask if you'd list all the machinery and tractors etc? Just for ease of reading Do you run your own semis/tandems when you haul the grain away from storage? How many acres do you crop? What are the expected bushels? Plenty of questions I know, but I love topics like these from other countries' members. It's fascinating to see the differences and similarities. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jasons Posted March 22, 2012 Author Share Posted March 22, 2012 amazing kit, most of that would not even fit through the entrances of our fields in Holland.. I made quite a few trips to the North American continent and have to say it is really something to see endless fields and the huge kits that work them.. We are used to 10 acre fields on average!!!! would you be needing extra muscle for the 24-rower? (a shame that it isnt there before the planting season) btw that Kinze grain cart is We probably won't need the extra horsepower for the 24 Row but we are worried about the hydraulic capacity. We'll give it a shot with the NH 9384 and if that doesn't work we may look into a new Deere R series tractor with FWA. We've had that old NH for a very long time now and it's served us very faithfully but it's probably getting time for it to go. We actually have one field that is 10 acres. When they created the drainage district in our area they decided to run a really big ditch through one of our fields and it separated the field into a 180 acre field and a 10 acre field. To this day I have no idea why. Of course this was all done in the 1920s and 1930s. Long before my time. I'd say our average size field is around 100 acres. Most fields get broke up by drainage ditches so there aren't a lot of really huge fields around here. Our biggest is 280 acres and we have another that's 240. The rest are closer to 100 though. Lovely photos Jason, really smart machinery you run. Is it your family or a place you work at? Also, could I ask if you'd list all the machinery and tractors etc? Just for ease of reading Do you run your own semis/tandems when you haul the grain away from storage? How many acres do you crop? What are the expected bushels? Plenty of questions I know, but I love topics like these from other countries' members. It's fascinating to see the differences and similarities. :) Glad to answer your questions, in my short time on the site my favorite thing has been seeing how others do it else where and how that effects their toy collecting. It's amazing that we all do basically the same thing, just a little differently. I farm with my family, My Father, Uncle, and Cousin more specifically. It sounds like My Father and Uncle are about to hang it up in the next year or two so that will just leave two of us I suppose. Although I can't see either of them retiring fully, they'd go crazy. Our machinary list is quite long but I'll try and remember it all. Case IH 485 quad track Case IH 450 quad track New Holland 9384 4wd John Deere 8230t John Deere 7810 fwa John Deere 7220 2wd (probably going to get sold soon, doesn't see much use these days) John Deere 6420 fwa with loader John Deere 4020 Farmall super H (family heirloom, it doesn't do any work any more) John Deere 9780 combine (30ft grain platform, 8 row corn platform) 2 Krause 40ft field cultivators Landoll 44 ft VT plus disc Landoll disc chisel Krause 7 shank inline ripper John Deere 7 shank V ripper Kinze 16/31 planter Kinze 1050 soft trak auger wagon Airsoft 90ft 3pt sprayer DMI 19 knife anhyrus applicator Doyle 80ft fertilizer buggy 2 westfield 80ft augers 30ft John Deere grain drill (actually 2 15 ft that connect together to make one 30ft) 2 freightliner semis 2 Volvo/white semis 2 tempti hopper bottom trailers 2 40ft dump trailers 1 EZ 2 load lowboy with detachable neck I think that will about catch it all As for acerage we are slightly over 3000. We'll plant about 1700 to corn this year, another 1000 to soybeans and we already have about 320 or so of wheat drilled from last fall. We'd expect about 200 bu/acre of corn, 60 bu/acre of beans, and about 40 bu/acre of wheat. Very nice equipment you have. Do you put drains in the same place every year or move them around? Yes, the "sidewinder" ditches as we call them go in the same spot every year. Even though the land is very flat there are very subtle elevation changes, usually just a foot or two. So you have to cut the ditches in certain spots every time to drain the field correctly. From our fields they drain into bigger ditches that surround the fields, then to an even larger main ditch that flows to a pump house near the river about a mile or two away. Because the river is leveed up the water can not flow into it naturally so it has to be pumped into the river with three giant cat motors. The whole system is an engineering marvel and truly amazing when you realize it was all planned and built almost 100 years ago. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fendt Fahrer Posted March 23, 2012 Share Posted March 23, 2012 very interesting thread. I think we should all start a thread like this and then we could get to know each other better and especially we would get a better feel of how things are worked in different places. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
persehall Posted March 23, 2012 Share Posted March 23, 2012 very interesting to see farming on this scale in other areas of the world.love seeing the machines we never get in the uk nick..... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deere-est Posted March 23, 2012 Share Posted March 23, 2012 Thanks for your reply, Jason. Really appreciate your time in responding to all those questions! Sounds like an interesting place to be working with the crops you grow and the drainage to think about too. You have some impressive machinery going by that list and the earlier photos you posted. I did the harvest trail in '03, seems like yesterday still. I loved the expanse of the plains but how close nit the communities are there. I always hoped to return but woman, house and now a puppy have put a stop to those ideas! If there is one common denominator when it comes to farmers the world over it is that they cannot retire! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tractorman810 Posted March 23, 2012 Share Posted March 23, 2012 what would the John Deere 7220 2wd usally be used for then?? over here you would never see a big jd like that in 2wd format,where as over there you seem to use a lot of "big "to us 2wd's i say big as to us in the uk and indeed in mainland europe a jd 7 series is mid to top end for a lot of farms that all, not the small tractor of the fleet Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jasons Posted March 24, 2012 Author Share Posted March 24, 2012 We used it for spraying soybeans. The 2wd keeps the weight down and doesn't do the damage on the ends when we turn. However we've started using the 8230t as we went to a bigger sprayer and the tracks don't compact nearly as bad as the 7220 with duals. We are also able to go quite a bit faster though the field with the track tractor because it just floats across the sidewinder ditches where as the 7220 needed to be idled down to cross the ditches. I hate to see the 7220 go because we went to the John Deere factory and watched it be built. That's the only tractor we've ever done that for. It was awesome, we got to help put parts on and follow it from start to finish. Then at the end we all signed under the hood and my Dad started it up and drove it off the line. It was just a neat family experience. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jdeere6910 Posted March 24, 2012 Share Posted March 24, 2012 Have you got any pictures of the 7220 Jason? I think they will be more like the 66/6820 we had over here than the 7020 series Keep up the good work with the pictures Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deere-est Posted March 24, 2012 Share Posted March 24, 2012 We used it for spraying soybeans. The 2wd keeps the weight down and doesn't do the damage on the ends when we turn. However we've started using the 8230t as we went to a bigger sprayer and the tracks don't compact nearly as bad as the 7220 with duals. We are also able to go quite a bit faster though the field with the track tractor because it just floats across the sidewinder ditches where as the 7220 needed to be idled down to cross the ditches. I hate to see the 7220 go because we went to the John Deere factory and watched it be built. That's the only tractor we've ever done that for. It was awesome, we got to help put parts on and follow it from start to finish. Then at the end we all signed under the hood and my Dad started it up and drove it off the line. It was just a neat family experience. Did you get a certificate and a gold key or something like that? I visited the Waterloo factory with the three other guys in my harvest crew and watched a family do just that with a 6020 series tractor I think it was. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jasons Posted March 25, 2012 Author Share Posted March 25, 2012 Have you got any pictures of the 7220 Jason? I think they will be more like the 66/6820 we had over here than the 7020 series Keep up the good work with the pictures Sure do have pictures. Here it is on one of our augers. Again ignore the time stamp, it's wrong Here is our 6420 just for fun one more of the combine for the heck of it. Did you get a certificate and a gold key or something like that? I visited the Waterloo factory with the three other guys in my harvest crew and watched a family do just that with a 6020 series tractor I think it was. Yep, they call it "gold key tours." You get your picture taken which goes in a book there at the factory, certificate, and hats that say "gold key member." It's a very neat experience being right there on the assymbly line watching it being built piece by piece. Even participating. We had to be there at 6am when the plant opened. They showed us a video on some new projects and instructed us on some saftey tips while on the line. Then they fed us breakfest. We went out on the line and followed every step. We even went on breaks with the workers. ha ha! Then at lunch they fed us a nice meal again while talking with some JD engineer types. Finally we headed back out on the line to finish the tractor. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Leakeyvale Posted March 25, 2012 Share Posted March 25, 2012 I must say I have not been to a tractor assembly plant but I have been given a guided tour of the Aston Martin works which left me thinking that the only part of an Aston that I can afford is the badge! Astons are built by hand and the only automated part of the production line is a glue applicator - a robot machine known affectionately as James [bond, James Bond]. Incidentally and totally off-topic - the last thing put on an Aston Martin is the badge and that is done only after the rest has passed all the inspections. I think I have to plan a visit to Waterloo next time I cross the pond. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ertlerik Posted March 25, 2012 Share Posted March 25, 2012 What a super lineup of equipment, I am a RED guy but love the big 2wd bambi Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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