A few years ago I was at John Deere World Headquarters in Illinois for the official unveiling of the brand’s S Series combines. To put some perspective on how big a deal this was, Deere’s marketing team guided us to the building’s large auditorium. There, they put their spotlights on a gleaming, impressive new S9, and right beside it, a 1960s vintage model 45 combine.
The diminutive model 45 looked positively primitive next to the high-tech S9, and it triggered an immediate reaction in me. When I was a kid growing up on the farm, our working combine was the pull-type version of the 45, the model 42. It seemed big to me at the time!
As combines have grown in size, their overall numbers on Canadian farms have decreased significantly. In 1996 there were 132,453 of them at work on farms across the country. By 2011, when Stats Canada stopped counting them, the number had fallen to 90,903. That’s a decline in the national fleet of 41,550 in only 15 years. But the number of farms had declined too. In fact, it had declined faster, so over that period, the number of combines per farm actually increased from an average of 1.18 in 1996 to 1.30 in 2011.
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The result is that the number of acres an average combine harvests had increased steadily, jumping from about 651 in 1996 to 862 acres per combine in 2011. And we all have a good idea where the number has gone since then.
All of us also know that it isn’t just the size or the brute strength of our combines that has gone up. Instead, we’ve added layer upon layer of technology, to the point where there is arguably nowhere else in farming that captures how fast and how thoroughly technology has changed our world.
To get a feel for how combines have changed over the years, I thought it would be worthwhile to follow the story of Massey Ferguson’s combine production in Brantford, Ont., which you’ll find below.
Times change, but in its perspectives on an industry racing to keep pace with technology and customer demand, we may find some lessons that are every bit as pertinent today.
MF 510
In June of 1964 Massey Ferguson, then a stand-alone company, proudly held the grand opening of what was widely acknowledged as the most high-tech farm equipment assembly plant then in existence. It was located in Brantford, Ont. The plant was modelled on the most modern auto manufacturing plants of the time and mimicked a lot of the assembly methods used in the auto industry, a first for ag equipment. The opening of this ultramodern facility coincided with the introduction of the most modern combine design MF engineers had yet come up with, the all-new 10 Series, which would include the 300, 410 and eventually the 510. The Brantford plant would be the first to build them.
Massey Ferguson was then a major global brand with very high market shares for all its equipment in 160 countries. The introduction of the new 10 Series combines would bump the brand up to number one in the North American combine market for several years.
The flagship model 510 saw production from 1965 through to 1971. Like all its serious competition at the time, it was a conventional straw-walker combine with six walkers and 45-inch-wide cylinder. The six-cylinder Perkins diesel engine put out just over 100 horsepower. Power was routed through a three-speed mechanical transmission with a mechanical variable speed drive in each gear to make speed adjustments to compensate for swath sizes.
The cab, if it had one, was a sheet metal and glass box that kept some of the dust out but increased the interior temperature significantly in direct sunlight. And, of course, the vibration amplified the machine noise to mind-numbing levels. Spending a day inside it left you exhausted and very dirty. (Ask me how I know.)
After 1971 the 510 was given some upgrades and a new body design to match the newer 700 and 800 models, and it was renumbered as the 550. What had been the brand’s largest model was now the smallest and kept in production to fill a small and decreasing demand from smaller producers.
700 and 800 Series
Throughout much of the 1970s and into the very early 1980s, the Brantford plant was working flat out to meet the ravenous demand from North American farmers for new combines. Farm profits were up and demand for new machinery of all types was high. During that period, the 10 Series machines had given way to newer and bigger designs in the 700 and 800 Series.
The new combines had greatly increased capacity and used a much more complex design. That jump in available options and efficiency made the combines more attractive in the evolving market, but created problems for the assembly plant as they had to figure out on their own how to build the machines efficiently. And in that era, just as with the Big Three Detroit automakers, build quality was generally poor, which led to an increased level of warranty work and dissatisfied customers.
The 700 and 800 Series saw several updates and new model designations as superior performance and operator comfort grew in importance in the combine market.
Rotary combines
By the early 1980s the farm economy was suffering a severe downturn and demand for new machinery dropped through the floor. That left brands with a lot of unsold inventory and red ink on the books. The Brantford plant was no exception.
At the same time, many brands were working on developing the next new combine technology, the rotary. New Holland beat everyone to the market with its twin-rotor TR70 in 1975, which left Massey Ferguson and others scrambling to keep up. Massey did have its own rotary combine R&D project underway in the early 1980s, but just before it was market ready the program was scrapped due to an an unexpected development caused by the economic crisis facing all combine manufacturers.
White Farm Equipment, which was also building combines in Brantford, had developed a rotary combine that was ready for the market in 1979. It was introduced as the model 9700. It had the largest capacity of any rotary then built. It saw some improvements and was renumbered the 9720 in 1984. Another model, the 9320, was just entering production when the assembly line suddenly stopped. WFE was placed in bankruptcy protection and forced to cease operations in 1985.
MF decided to acquire the White rotary technology instead of continuing R&D on its own design. All remaining White combines along with all the existing parts were purchased from the receiver. The 9320s became the MF 8560 and the 9720 became the MF 8590.
The biggest White-turned-Massey rotary combine is generally acknowledged to have kicked off the race for ever more capacity in machines using the rotary design.
But the White rotary design would soon suffer another setback. The flagging farm economy had hit Massey Ferguson hard, too. The company’s Brantford combine plant was bleeding company cash the fastest, so later in 1985 MF management did something that remains controversial to this day. It sectioned off the Brantford plant and combine production from the rest of Massey Ferguson, creating Massey Combines Corp., a now independent company. It also assigned MCC an inexplicably large amount of company debt (nearly all of it in fact) which actually exceeded the value of the assets assigned to MCC. By 1988 the inevitable happened; MCC fell into bankruptcy too, owing about $290 million and laying off 2,500 workers.
Western Combines Corp. of Portage la Prairie, Man., acquired the rights to produce the Massey rotary and continued production of the Massey 8560, which became the 8570 and lived on in limited production at Western until 1993, when AGCO, now the owner of the Massey Ferguson brand, acquired the line from Western, reuniting the Massey Combines line with its original brand.
In the end, though, the reunion would be another episode in the hard-luck life of Massey Combines. After bringing them back into the Massey Ferguson fold, AGCO moved production to Hesston, Kansas, where it stayed until AGCO reduced its combine brands to just Gleaner and the Fendt IDEAL, finally ending production of the MF-branded combine.
