TechTour: Designing the IDEAL combine

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AGCO’s new generation of combine harvester made its first public appearance at Agritechnica in Germany last month.

The result of the company’s largest ever product development project, the graphite-coloured IDEAL combine will be sold under AGCO’s Challenger, Fendt and Massey Ferguson brands.

“We started from a clean sheet of paper. It’s a complete new combine…and we tried to make everything ideal,” explains Peter-Josef Paffen, chairman of AGCO/Fendt’s management board, in this TechTour video.

The IDEAL combine received the “2018 Machine of the Year” award in the combine category at Agritechnica (Peter-Josef Paffen pictured on the right).

The IDEAL harvester comes in three sizes — the 7, 8 and 9, featuring single and dual rotary threshing systems, and ranging from 450 to 650 horsepower. Paffen explains the rotors were designed to release grain while leaving straw as intact as possible, requiring less power at the threshing stage.

“We’ve found a way with smooth handling of the material to get all the kernels out and to get the straw not disturbed, just to the swath,” he says.

The machine is available in a standard or “flat land” design, as well as in a ParaLevel version for harvesting on slopes. The AGCO booth in Hanover featured a Fendt 9T (with tracks) and a Massey 7PL (with the ParaLevel system.)

The Massey Ferguson IDEAL 7PL

AGCO has said the new combines will be launched in different markets around the world beginning in 2018. While prototypes were tested in North America this fall, timing for the IDEAL combine in Canada and the U.S. has not been announced.

Paffen spoke with RealAg’s Shaun Haney about how the combine was designed, how automation optimizes the machine’s performance, and plans for marketing it:

Click here for more from Agritechnica 2017! RealAgriculture’s coverage of Agritechnica and the TechTour video series are brought to you by Dow AgroSciences.

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