And the award goes to...

While channel surfing with the TV remote control this week, I noticed that the American Music Awards were on. And now the news, and the other fashion programs my wife watches, are busy doing a forensic analysis of the gowns worn by all the celebrity women attending it. I'm sure just some of the shoes[...]

The Russians are coming!

A few decades ago the former Canadian distributor of Belarus tractors included high-horsepower, four-wheel drive tractors in its product line, and they wore the Belarus brand name. But these machines weren’t built in the same factory in Minsk, Belarus that produced the front-wheel assist models that distributor sold here at the time, because the Minsk[...]


The orange wave

The upcoming December issue of Grainews will take a look at what's new in tractors this year. There's a lot to report. And just when we thought we could probably cram it all into one issue, along comes today's announcement of another new model from Kubota. The new Kubota M6S-111 tractor is being unveiled at[...]

How to track down an electrical fault

Automotive electrical systems in newer machines that make extensive use of computer processors can be very complex and confusing. But there are a lot of machines on the farm with electrical systems that won’t have anywhere near that level of complexity, especially those with diesel engines and no computer controls. Finding and fixing electrical faults[...]


It's alive!

As thunder crashed and lightning flashed, Dr. Frankenstein shouted those immortal words, “It's alive!”. Who could forget that classic scene in the old movie? Exactly the same thing happened in my laboratory (ok, workshop) this week. I animated the dead—sort of. As lightning flashed around me, I yelled from the workshop roof on Halloween, “It's[...]

Social skills

At the JCB Fastrac product launch in the English Midlands a couple of weeks ago, I had the very pleasant opportunity to reconnect with a bunch of farm machinery writers and editors from England. They're people I've met or written for in the past couple of decades doing this job. The opportunity to talk shop[...]


Bourgault redesigns the 9400 chisel plow

We had the 9400 (chisel plow) for many years, and there’s been a resurgence in tillage and deep tillage,” says Rob Fagnou, marketing specialist at Bourgault. “So we went to the drawing board again and redesigned it from the ground up. ” The new 9500 Series models, which made their first public appearance at Canada’s[...]

Familiar brands, new tillage implements

With a renewed interest in tillage all across the prairies and the need to deal with higher levels of corn residue in fields across the U.S. Midwest, it’s no surprise there were some new tillage tool introductions at the U.S. Farm Progress Show in Boone, Iowa, in August. Here’s a look at what the familiar[...]


More Fastrac horsepower

This week JCB revealed its new ag sector machinery offerings by holding a media event at its world headquarters near Rocester England. In the impressive style of machine introduction events I've seen from this brand before, a stage curtain in the company's on-campus theatre lifted to reveal their newest product. In this case, the machine[...]

Updated compact discs from Lemken

Surrounded by a group of English-speaking farm writers, Lukas Voss, a product specialist at Germany-based equipment manufacturer Lemken, walks around one of that brand’s Heliodor 9 compact discs in a farm field in Hungary in late June. The field demos were part of an international press event, held to show off Lemken’s 2016 equipment line.[...]