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Hampshire farmer and contractor Alan Cook uses his John Deere 9880i STS Hillmaster combine to harvest the UK’s largest annual acreage of grain maize, in addition to 1000 acres of his own combinable crops and 1500 acres of stubble to stubble contracts.
Over the last five years, Alan reckons to have cut more grain maize with a John Deere combine than anyone else in the country, averaging between 1200 and 1300 acres a year, or 30 per cent of his annual harvest. In addition to a specialist eight-row hydraulic folding maize header, the new STS is equipped with AutoTrac automatic steering, HarvestSmart automatic feedrate control and four-wheel drive.
The maize header only takes the cob into the combine, where the single STS rotor strips off the grain, and allows just the core to go through to the rear chopper. The rest of the maize plant is cut and dropped into the path of the combine before it goes through the header.
"Most of what I harvest is being sold as crimped grain maize for animal feed," says Alan. "In a good crop, the combine can deliver 50 tonnes an hour at 30 per cent moisture content into the customer’s store, and not many driers can take out 15 per cent moisture at that rate of harvesting. The advantage of crimping is that the maize can be ensiled and stored just like grass or maize silage, so other yard machinery can keep up with the combine."
"It is a high specification combine, but when you’re doing anything up to 4000 acres a season with one machine across all crops, the extra features come in very useful – and they add to the resale value, which is important. Because the STS uses a single threshing rotor, the hillside option is a big advantage as it keeps the whole combine body level."
"Four wheel drive is another benefit, especially in sticky conditions. With the grain maize crop, though, because most of the plant is being cut and laid on the ground in front of the header, the combine wheels run on a freshly chopped carpet of material, so they tend not to make much of a mess anyway."
"Quality with the STS is fantastic, it certainly produces the best sample I’ve ever experienced. John Deere has designed not only a very good combine for cereals – because it has a long pedigree in the US as a corn combine, you’d expect it to do a great job in maize, which it does."
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