Late October is when soybean moisture swings the hardest. A field can thresh clean at two in the afternoon and turn rubbery by dusk, and the combine that looked perfect at lunch is suddenly dumping split beans into the tank. Anyone who has run beans this time of year knows that no single number on […]
By early October, combines are already rolling in parts of the Plains and Mid-South, and every farmer with corn still standing is wrestling with the same decision: run now and pay to dry it, or wait for the field to do the drying and live with whatever the weather, the stalks, and the ear shanks […]
Harvest is wrapping up across most of the Corn Belt right now, which means one thing on a lot of farms: the post-harvest equipment conversation. If your combine left grain in the field again this year, or you spent more time than you’d like swapping concaves between corn and beans, you’re probably already searching for […]
Harvest is rolling across the Corn Belt right now, and if you’re like most operators mid-season, you don’t have time to guess whether an aftermarket part will bolt up to your machine. Every fall, the same question lands in the Estes inbox: “Will the XPR3 actually fit my combine, or is this another concave system […]
Case IH’s Axial-Flow line has built its reputation on a single-rotor design that’s stayed remarkably consistent for decades, and that consistency is actually good news for anyone shopping for concave upgrades. Because the AFX rotor architecture has carried forward across so many model years, factory and aftermarket concave options tend to have a wider compatibility […]
Corn prices move up and down every season, but there’s one loss farmers rarely talk about because it never shows up on a settlement sheet: grain left in the field. With 2026 bringing record harvested corn acreage nationwide and disease pressure from anthracnose and tar spot pushing some growers toward earlier harvest dates, the margin […]
Ask ten people outside of farming to explain the difference between a tractor and a combine harvester, and most will struggle. Even inside agriculture, the terms get blurred – searches for “combine tractor” and “tractor combine” show up constantly, usually from people trying to figure out if these are two names for the same machine […]
Large grain operations are running fewer hands across more acres every season, and the gap isn’t closing on its own. Modern equipment and automation have become the practical answer for farms that need to cover more ground, thresh more bushels, and keep the combine rolling without hiring the extra crew they can’t find. Here’s how […]
John Deere just announced its Model Year 2027 lineup for the X9 and S7 combines, and the headline feature is more automation than ever — including a system that automatically dials in your concave clearance based on crop type and geolocation. It’s a genuinely impressive piece of engineering. It’s also not the fix most farmers […]
Most farmers blame ground speed or crop conditions when grain loss climbs. The concave sitting inside the rotor housing is usually the bigger factor — and it’s the one almost nobody checks first. Every bushel that exits the back of a combine instead of landing in the tank is a bushel that’s already been grown, […]