It has been 50 years since New Holland introduced the Twin Rotor threshing and separation combine harvester technology, which has grown from a single product in 1975 to a comprehensive range today.
The anniversary will be celebrated by special displays at a series of events across the globe.
Since launching, more than 70,000 TR and CR combines have been produced, with significant investment in the Centre of Harvesting Excellence in Zedelgem, Belgium for the production of the latest CR10 and CR11 machines.
Moving into combines
New Holland was primarily a US-based manufacturer before it acquired the Belgian company Claeys in 1964. This not only brought it to the European market but enabled it to enter the combine market, building on Claeys self-propelled machine.
The company continued to develop the straw walker line before starting to investigate new ways of threshing and separation.
Engineers looked at using centrifugal force to separate the grain, adapting a 985 straw walker machine in 1968 to trial it in corn, before moving on to wheat a year later.
The trials showed the benefit of splitting the incoming crop flow from the feeder house into two streams and feeding them into two counter-rotating longitudinal rotors. The speed of the rotors created a centrifugal force that ejected much of the grain through the concave – reducing damage and minimising losses.
The first production mode, a TR70 with a 145hp engine and 5,500-litre grain tank, was launched in 1975, before being upgraded in 1979 with the TR75 and the larger TR85.
Several developments were integrated into the range over the next 20 years, during which time the company produced 25,000 machines. The final one of these left the production line in 1997.
A new design
By the late 1990s, engineers were working on a new Twin Rotor design to meet capacity demands in all crops across Europe and America.
For 2002, New Holland introduced the 333hp CR960 and 428hp CR980, using design elements from both the TF and TR ranges. These were initially built in America, before production moved to Zedelgem in 2005.
The CR960 featured 432mm diameter twin rotors, with larger 560mm diameter units on the CR980, which had a 12,500-litre grain tank. The range has expanded since then with new features such as IntelliSense combine automation, Dynamic Flow Control remotely-adjustable rotor vanes, Dynamic Feed Roll technology and Opti-Spread Plus residue management.
Elevation models were introduced in 2007, featuring IntelliCruise feed rate control and Opti-Clean cleaning technology. The next developments were CR7.90, CR8.90, CR9.90 and CR10.90 models, with the latter machine in 2014 taking the Guinness World Record for the most wheat harvested in eight hours, at 797.656 tonnes.
The range is now topped with the CR11 (775hp, 20,000-litre tank capacity) and CR10 (634hp, 16,000-litre grain tank) models.