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MacDon Owner: Schemper Harvesting & Trucking

JC Schemper of Schemper Harvesting & Trucking has MacDon draper headers but decided to give the corn headers a try. Here's what he has to say about the MacDon C Series Headers.


Video Transcript:

We have been in business since 1959, is when my granddad started this business, so we've been doing it for over 60 years. I operate a harvesting business with my dad, uncle, and brother. We run nine S-Series John Deere combines. A lot of roads going out every day, that's right.

In a season, we're shooting for 10,000 acres per machine. Obviously, this time of year, if you can get 100 acres of corn a day, you're doing pretty good with the elevator lines and everything that goes with that.

When MacDon come out with a corn head, We decided as good of a quality as we've had with the drapers, we thought we'd try the corn heads. Customers, they say that MacDon does the best job on the stocks. They like to see that open at the top and MacDon having a cutting blade and then having a comb blade, it really opens up the stock to sunlight, wind, and really can break down faster. So a lot of my guys in this area are no-till and they like that for that reason that it breaks down faster.

The chains on the gathering chains are together and they're a little bit longer apart on the gathering chain. So you have more room for that ear to sit there on the deck plate. With the deck plate also has a little bit of a bevel at the end. So it kind of cradles the butt of that corn coming in. We're seeing less shatter with our MacDon than we do with our other brands for that simple reason. The deck plate design and also the chain on how they run that.

So the snoots on the MacDon and down corn seem to be a little bit better as far as picking it up. One of the highlights of it, it just seems like we don't run any paddles in the middle of our auger, but you won't ever see an ear jump out of that header either. So some of the other brands, you'll see an ear or two fly out of the header because of just the way the pitch is. MacDons, I don't see that.

So we have the rotaries. I call them screwdrivers. Those little rotary things on the side. And down corn, that is just a must-have. I see a lot of value to having those on the ends for our customers to get more bushels.

Ease of adjustment on the chains on the side of the headers. There's a door you open up and it's right there. Easy to service, easy to look at things on it. Just don't have as many issues with the MacDon as we do with the other brands.

But we really haven't had much downtime at all. MacDon focuses on headers. They don't focus on combines, green carts, tractors, any of that stuff. They focus on a header only. And when you call MacDon, MacDon knows about headers. They know what to do to fix our things.

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