New Holland’s new flagship combine, the 775-hp CR11, was redesigned from the ground up to lean more heavily into productivity and power efficiency. The new model made its North American debut at the 2024 National Farm Machinery Show in Louisville.
New Holland said it tailored the new combine in anticipation of how harvesting demands will continue to evolve. Because of how higher-yielding crops and unpredictable weather can affect both this season’s crop and the next, New Holland engineers aimed to design a machine that can clear fields quickly to protect the quality while ensuring the following year’s crop establishment can occur in good time and conditions.
About 90 percent of the machine is new components, and New Holland said it had to rethink everything to get to this capacity. It will do 20 percent to 40 percent more than the already robust CR10.90, which is the current flagship.
“This machine is not just a refresh of our CR10.90, which is in its own league and still the world record holder for wheat harvest. The CR11 is a totally new design,” said Curtis Hillen, combine marketing manager for New Holland Agriculture North America. “It’s a new platform that New Holland is going to build off of for the next level of productivity in twin-rotor combines.”
More productivity, maximum grain savings, premium residue management, and enhanced uptime are the four pillars the CR11 combine is built on. All four pillars support the machine’s overall objective to reduce the total cost of harvesting, a combination of financial cost and time that, when optimized, results in the overall improvement of the farmer’s bottom-line profitability. For example, it has 25 percent fewer drive components, and all drive chains have been eliminated.
It features a 775-horsepower C16 engine, 2-by-24-inch rotors (which is larger than what the CR10.90 had), 567-bushel grain tank, and a 6 bushels per second unload rate.
“While we’re looking for a higher level of productivity, we’re also interested in doing that in a way that’s efficient so that we reduce the operator’s total cost of harvesting,” Hillen said. “We’ve got a bigger threshing system, 24-inch rotors, a new twin-clean cleaning system that’s essentially two cleaning systems front to back, offering up to 50 percent more cleaning capacity. We also have a new elevator system to handle that capacity, a new grain tank and unloader.”
He also explained that the CR11 combine features a new residue system, so the chopper and spreader is totally different. The hood-mount chopper has been raised up in the chassis and its rotation reversed, providing a more efficient flow of material through the chopper. The machine then it projects that chopper material down into the new spreader, which is is capable of spreading our chopped straw plus chaff more than 60 feet.
“And with that, we’ve added a new automation feature spreading — we call it IntelliSpread,” Hillen said. “We have radars mounted on the back of the spreader that are actually looking at the spread material and evaluating whether or not it’s hitting the target. And then we use that feedback from the radars to automate the spreader controls, so that you’re always getting a uniform spread width.” This is regardless of wind effects, crop type, or moisture conditions.
The IntelliSpread radar system won a 2022 Agritechnica Innovation Silver Medal.
Additionally, a new fully automated de-slug procedure was designed to reduce downtime. While the new CR11 combine is ready to be pushed for maximum throughput, New Holland recognizes it’s impossible to completely eliminate any risk of plugging. In the unlikely event of a combine blockage, the automatic de-slug program guides the operator through an unplugging procedure that enables them to clear the combine in minutes without leaving the comfort of the combine cab.
Because it significantly reduces downtime caused by such a scenario, the automated de-slug procedure gives the operator confidence to utilize the combine’s full capacity potential without concern of blocking. In addition to bolstering operator confidence and providing peace of mind, this feature increases safety when clearing a blockage, as operators are not required to leave the cab during the automated de-slug process.
The CR11 was first seen at Agritechnica 2023 last November in Germany. Now that it has debuted in North America, it will be on-site at a variety of shows throughout the year:
- Commodity Classic 2024, February 28-March 1 in Houston, Texas
- Ag in Motion, July 16-18 in Langham, Saskatchewan
- Ag PhD Field Day, July 25 in Baltic, South Dakota
- Farm Progress Show, August 27-29 in Boone, Iowa
- Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show, September 10-12 in Woodstock, Ontario
- Husker Harvest Days, September 10-12 in Wood River, Nebraska
- Agri-Trade Equipment Expo, November 13-15 in Red Deer, Alberta
There will be a limited number of demo machines in North America for the 2024 season, with full production slated for 2025.
