Lance Wise is basically TikTok famous.

The 38-year-old Australian farmer posts clips on the social media app for his 36.9 thousand followers, showcasing the various equipment and techniques he uses to manage his more than 2,000 hectares (4,900 acres) in the Darling Downs region of Queensland, Australia. Not a camera-shy guy, Lance regularly shows his face as he completes tasks, walking his audience through every step along the way.

Lance has been creating TikToks since 2020, and some of his most popular videos have been viewed literally millions of times.

"Basically, driving the combine is what gets me the most views, explaining how it works and all that type of thing. But it originated with me just trying to put music to videos and post them on Twitter, or now X. Just trying to put music to video easily and share it to show people what we're doing," says Lance.

"And now it's kind of morphed through live (streams on TikTok) and stuff, just explaining exactly what's going on. The machines we're using, why we're using them, and just talking about farming. It's a quick experience for others; they can jump on there and ask questions, and I can quickly answer them. It's just sharing knowledge, I suppose."

Earlier this year, Lance posted a video about MacDon's new FD261 FlexDraper®. In the two-minute clip with nearly 20,000 views, Lance discusses how the header works and his experience using it to harvest sorghum while showing the machine from all angles.

"What I've found with this front (header), especially in sorghum because that's the only crop I've used it in so far, you're not chasing the stick. So you're not trying to push it in the lighter crops and pull it back in the heavy crops. It's got enough material coming in that the engine load can work correctly, and it's sitting on whatever yield you've got coming in. Say you're doing a hundred tonne an hour through the header; it'll do a hundred tonne an hour pretty well all day without needing to fight around too much, it's pretty handy that way," he explains in the video before discussing the auger length and weight.

"But it doesn't fit in the shed," he laughs.

In the comment section, he fields a wide range of questions from viewers, ranging from simple to technical. When asked in this interview if comments frequently come in when he posts about MacDon products, Lance responds quickly: "All the time."

"They ask why we got one and how well it works and all that sort of thing. And obviously, they're seeing the visual of that, and they can tell how fast I'm going, what the tonnage is coming in, and real-time watching it happen."

The farming industry cannot escape the influencer culture that has permeated the world of online sales. But unlike a typical influencer who is paid to share positive thoughts on a brand, Lance is free to offer whatever opinion he has, be it positive or negative, about the products and machinery he's using. He notes the rise of these kinds of review-type videos has really changed the farming industry's marketing landscape.

"It's probably really easy marketing for any manufacturer, but you know, if it's fluff, people will know about that too very quickly," he laughs.

But when it comes to his MacDon machines, he's got only good things to say, including for the new FD261 FlexDraper®, which he was able to test earlier this year.

At 61 feet wide with 50-inch-deep drapers, the FD261 is the highest capacity FlexDraper® MacDon has ever produced. Compared to the 50-foot FD250, the FD261 provides an additional 22% of overall capacity. The 61-foot gathering width is an ideal solution for controlled traffic farming.

Lance ran a prototype of the FD261 through this past summer's crops and describes it as "a really good machine."

"It's a lot like the FD241, except another six meters longer," Lance jokes, dropping in a bit of the signature sense of humour which pops up in a lot of his online content.

"The three-section reels are absolutely excellent. They follow the knife as it flexes over contours, and also the flex being a slightly wider center deck, it just makes the whole machine work to follow the ground really well," he explains further.

"What it did, especially through the sorghum, was that there was always enough throughput coming into the machine, regardless of whether it was a two-and-a-half-ton crop or a seven-and-a-half-ton crop. It allowed the machines to run at 100 percent or 95 percent all day, regardless of the yield, without needing to chase speed to try and do that."

"It's not a machine for everyone because it's 61 feet, right? But running it, you'd almost consider it over a second header because it makes the one you've got perform to its absolute max, doing exactly what it needs to do. Instead of chasing it all day, you're a bit more relaxed, and it's getting everything it needs," Lance continues.

"You're going to need a bigger shed, but whatever machine you put it on, it will make that run a hundred percent all the time, efficiently and easily."

Testing the FD261 wasn't Lance's first introduction to MacDon, however; he currently owns and runs an FD241, which he has owned for three years, and started with an FD75 FlexDraper®, purchased more than eight years ago.

Having no previous experience with MacDon, Lance and his family were encouraged by other local farmers' opinions when deciding whether to invest in their first MacDon FlexDraper. Many farming colleagues spoke highly about MacDon's headers, so Lance says he just jumped on the trend and that so far, "it's been a good way to go."

Ultimately, though, the decision to go with MacDon was based on the fact that the FD75 offered many of the key features Wise was looking for at the time.

"It's a little bit more robust of a machine, a little bit more user friendly, a better floatation system, and a better flex system, which is what we were looking for. Being able to hug that ground and follow it mechanically, without any sensors, was really crucial for us because the fewer sensors, the better," he says.

"And then you know just the ease of use as well; there are not as many daily checks, the whole machine is much more user-friendly and allows you to get close to the ground as well."

Upgrading to the FD241 was a "giant step," says Lance, adding the performance enhancements on the FD2 paired nicely with their combine.

"With the deeper belts and a slightly bigger knife and more capacity there, it definitely feeds the bigger machine quite well without needing to sort of force feed it."

"Just the ability to carry more on the belts itself, the wider draper was very crucial to us. It stopped the bunching, and the deeper belt meant we could carry more material and not flip crop over the reel without needing the likes of a canola cross auger. So that was the main thing, being able to feed the header correctly is a hundred percent crucial," Lance says of the FD241.

Darling Downs is famous as a fertile farming region located in the drainage basins of the Condamine and Maranoa rivers. Darling Downs produces around one-quarter of Queensland's agricultural output. For context, Queensland is the second-largest and third-most-populous of Australia's six states, sitting at around 5.5 million people as of 2023 and covering 1,723,030 square kilometres (665,300 square miles) of land.

Lance's ground is mainly soft-mulching clays from volcanic red ridges.

"So we sort of got to be able to flex quite well. It's all drivable, but it's all undulating, I suppose is the way to put it. The FD241 has definitely made going across the contour bank a lot simpler. Where we used to do two or three stripes along the contour bank, we can just drive it over them and not even worry about it," he says.

In terms of user-friendliness, Lance insists the FD241 is very manageable and the provided resources from MacDon make set-up and usage a breeze.

"All the instruction is there for balancing and getting the weights right across the center mainframe there through to the wing flex adjustments, that's all very, very simple. It's on there and it's a fairly quick adjustment once you get used to it and have a go a couple of times. It just works really well," he says.

"You set it to float across the ground, and it does exactly what you want to do with very little input. It has to be a fairly big hole or a bump to need any input from the operator. That sort of helps you relax a bit and you're not on the buttons all day trying to follow the ground and doing it by yourself. It's just made it a lot easier for the operator."

When it comes to understanding the literal and figurative ups and downs of this land, Lance has it in his blood.

His maternal grandparents had a farm over the road from where Wise Farms is now; as Lance says, his mother, Janette Wise, "hasn't gone too far." Conversely, Lance's father, Murray Wise, moved up to the Darling Downs area in the 1970s all the way from Victoria, Australia, which is nearly 1,500 kilometres (900 miles) away.

Some basic math will reveal that Wise Farms has been in the area for more than 40 years. They now have more than 2,000 hectares on which they mainly grow cereals such as sorghum, barley and wheat, a few legumes such as mung beans and chickpeas, and a little bit of canola.

While they haven't been using MacDons for 40+ years, Lance is still impressed with the way the machines have held up season to season.

"Wear-wise, the FD2 is doing quite well. The plates underneath are wearing quite well, as well as skid plates and so on. We haven't had any issues with it. It's just been running and making the combine perform quite well."

In addition to the machines themselves being reliable and sturdy, MacDon's top-tier customer service being reliable and sturdy is also an important selling point for Lance. The weather in the region can be quite erratic, and, as Lance notes, this year specifically has been challenging with heavy storms and colder spring temperatures than expected, making harvesting even slower and more complex than usual.

His wheat, he says, is "terribly frost- and drought-affected"; he explains that it all looks good from the combine cab or walking past, but then he grabs a head and half is pinched up, or he grabs another head, and it looks full, but there's nothing in it. After speaking to others in town, everyone seems to have the same issues this season.

With bad weather impacting the crops' quality, it's even more imperative to harvest usable grains and cereals at its peak to ensure the highest possible selling price. The last thing Lance needs is a machine that might be out-of-service. That's when MacDon's quick, thorough and efficient customer service becomes all the more important.

"Customer service is everything," he emphasizes. "We've got to keep machines running. We've only got a short window between storms to get out in the field and get as much off as we can. So it's very important to keep those things top-notch and moving forward, basically."

While MacDon is a familiar name in Wise's part of the world, he says he sees more and more MacDon machines on the fields every year as other farms learn about the products and see how effective they are in real-time, just like he did years ago when he purchased that first FD75.

"It's growing all the time, as more people realize how good they are," he says.

"They're probably on a more expensive scale of things for our area. We've got Midwest 30 minutes away, which is an Australian manufacturer. But just with the FlexDraper, MacDon is just a superior product. And no paddock is perfect, so you have that ability to hug the ground and do a low cut and still get the performance out of the machine. That is key to us."

"It's definitely worth the extra investment."