Award-Winning Harvesting Performance, Times Three!
MacDon wins three AE50 awards for the FD261 FlexDraper, FC Series FlexCorn, and the R1 FR Front Mount. Neil Barnett explains how MacDon's history of building relationships and bringing real-world in-field value to producers through innovation is what really drives our success.
The members of MacDon's product teams had an extra reason to celebrate this past holiday season; three of the company's products – the FD261 FlexDraper®, the FC Series FlexCorn Header, and the R1 FR Front Mount Rotary Disc Header – were named AE50 award winners on the 2025 list.
While this isn't the first time MacDon's products have snagged some sought-after spots on the AE50 list – which annually honors the 50 best innovations in engineering and technology for agricultural, food and biological systems – MacDon's Vice-President of Product Development, Neil Barnett, says it's always nice getting recognition at this level for the truly creative and original product solutions MacDon develops.
"Getting feedback from an engineering organization like ASABE (American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers) is meaningful both for me and my team. I have been a member since the late '90s myself, and I know many people in this organization, so it's very rewarding to be acknowledged for these products in front of that group," says Barnett, who has been with MacDon for over 25 years.
"For the team, it is also great as it is an excellent acknowledgement of their accomplishment by other engineers. The most significant acknowledgement is positive market reception and a contribution to the business, but this would be a second. It also provides a great opportunity for a few people to go to Louisville (to the AETC Conference) to pick up the award and be acknowledged."
"Engineers tend to hear about a lot of the problems and concerns from the factory and field, so it is nice to get the external positive reinforcement as well."
The AE50 Awards are sponsored by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, whose mission is to "promote engineering in food, water, energy, fiber and the environment. According to ASABE's January/February 2024 issue of Resource magazine, the seeds of what is now the AE50 awards were planted 40 years ago, in June of 1984, as a special issue of what was then called Agricultural Engineering – hence the AE in AE50 – which highlighted 25 "new techniques, inventions and innovations." At that time, there wasn't really an application process; instead, information was solicited by ASABE and judged by a panel of engineers. Two years later, they decided to open up a nomination process and were immediately flooded with applications.
"An enlisted panel of experts reviewed the entries, and in 1986 the first AE50 Awards were presented," the article states.
While the process is still much the same nearly four decades later, Barnett says creating the application packages for each product has become no small feat.
"There's a substantial application that has to go in to justify why what we are submitting should be chosen as one of the awards. So, the product managers pull that together with a little bit of help from the product engineering (team) as well. The judges want to see that a significant challenge had to be overcome to bring this product to market. So the justification typically focuses on the technical aspects, such as unique designs, specialized tools used, or different approaches that demonstrate how the product is innovative," says Barnett.
Even before the applications can be built, numerous eligibility criteria must be met, including making sure the product was released within the correct window of time. Then, of course, there's the process of selecting which products to nominate, as not every release each year necessarily fits the bill for these specific awards.
While the judging committee, selection process, and total number of applicants remain confidential, ASABE awards administrator Corey Sayles said the majority of applications come from North American companies. Still, they usually see several international applicants each year.
Winning 3 AE50 awards in 2025, MacDon obviously hit the nail on the head when it comes to the innovation the AE50 awards are looking for.
FD261 FlexDraper - 2025 AE50 Award Winner
The FD261 FlexDraper header was a product around two years in the making. It came about after seeing a need in the market for an even wider header than the FD250 series, which, at 50 feet, was previously the widest header MacDon offered.
"There's recently been a number of big combines released onto the market… pushing the combine classes up from nine to ten and bigger now, and so there was a need for a bigger header, especially in areas where yields were a little lower, like in Australia and Western Canada, in some places. So the need for a 60-foot header had become more apparent," explains Barnett.
"It was a wider configuration than anything built before. A couple of competitive units were on the market, but none used a flex frame like ours. The competitors either used a rigid frame and rigid cutter bar or a rigid frame and a flex cutter bar. So our approach was different and true with what we've had outstanding success with, where we have a consistent reel-to-cutter bar interaction, resulting in excellent feeding."
FC Series FlexCorn Header - 2025 AE50 Award Winner
The FC Series FlexCorn Header is designed and marketed toward a much more niche market than the FD261, but it is a high-value product for those who need it.
MacDon has been in corn headers since 2018, when its now-parent company, Linamar, acquired MacDon. Linamar already owned a business with corn headers in Eastern Europe and Hungary, leading to MacDon's production. Barnett says the first MacDon corn headers were on the market by 2019.
"For MacDon, having unique attributes for our product on the marketplace is always important. We're short-line manufacturing, and we need to differentiate our products in a unique way that provides value in the field to our customers. So for the FlexCorn, we came up with a way of utilizing some technology similar to what's on our flex and rigid drapers and applied it to the corn header," explains Barnett.
"The market for the FlexCorn header is much narrower than the market for a FlexDraper header because corn ears are generally quite high off the ground, relative to soybeans, and so they don't necessarily always justify the complexity of a flex-frame header. But there are some regions where their ground is very, very hilly – in particular in the Missouri River Valley, kind of in Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska, maybe Kansas, to a certain extent – where they have farmable terraces and built-up slopes to reduce water erosion, and they want to be able to harvest with wider headers. Previously, they were constrained to eight-row headers, and that was pushing what they could do. They wanted to go to 12 and 16 and needed a solution like this."
MacDon took advantage of already having developed the FlexDraper technology and applied it to the corn header to create a one-of-a-kind product that provides one-of-a-kind results.
"Our approach to using our technology, which is more similar to our FlexDraper header, allows for improved ground following and higher capacity compared to our only competitor in the market. So while it is a relatively small market, our customers are receiving this product very well," Barnett says.
R1 FR Front Mount Rotary Disc - 2025 AE50 Award Winner
Much like the FlexCorn header, the R1 FR Front Mount Rotary Disc Header was also designed with a niche market in mind. As Barnett explains, the demand for mowing hay has significantly moved to triple mowers, which generally originate from Europe and are currently offered by many farming machinery brands.
"The value proposition of the front mount is that it gets paired with a pull-type mower for up to 32 feet of cutting capacity, similar to many triple mowers. The difference is that with our front mount and rear pull type, we have two mowers working together to make 30 to 32 feet of overall capacity. With the triple mowers, as their name says, there are three, and there are some areas in North America (where) their processes are all built around 16-foot cutting units, and that's what our unit is based on, using 16-foot cutting units," says Barnett.
"I visited a customer two weeks ago with our product manager, who was in Arizona. He was definitely seeing the value in efficiency gains, and the advantage of having the 16-foot cut width was critical to him. So, in a way, he was able to validate some of our original assumptions. The trick will be to see how big that niche is and work within it," Barnett says.
"We don't really have any competitors in the market for this size of machine right now. So we'll have to focus on building out the market ourselves. But again, we see the value."
Innovations for Harvesting Performance
That value is made very clear when Barnett and his colleagues visit customers who use the products on the ground and in the field every day and rely on those products to get the most out of their harvesting windows. Customer feedback is hugely important when developing and testing new products; Barnett often visits customers – more than 50 in 2024 himself – and says MacDon has become "more in tune with capturing insights" from farmers and customers, whose opinions and insights are invaluable. MacDon representatives go into those visits with specific topics and questions in mind to help focus the conversation and find areas and opportunities to improve their operations.
"The most successful opportunities we often find are the ones where we can identify them early and find the limitations in the customer systems, and especially when they're not always the obvious things," says Barnett, who also does follow-up visits after customers purchase products to see how things are going for them.
This thorough leg work, from idea and design to testing, feedback and completion, led to commendations such as the AE50 Awards.
When it comes down to it, the three products acknowledged by AE50 this year are not only tied to each other because of innovative design. They are tied to each other by what they do for the customers who use them. Each product provides tangible results regarding efficiency and the quality and quantity of crop yields, which is paramount to Barnett, his team, and MacDon.
"It's important for us to develop designs that can provide a clear value to our customers, to our dealers, and provide something that's different from the competition. That's kind of MacDon's sweet spot for success, really," says Barnett.
"Speaking specifically to the areas around product and innovation, it's that strong focus on product innovation, around advancing our product, and that the product has been successful with the customers and has delivered value to their operation. It's one thing to innovate products and develop unique designs and features, but those features have proven to be very valuable to customers. So it's the connection with the customers and continuous feedback that really delivers value," he continues.
"It's something MacDon has done successfully; we found some interesting niches and explored them. And sometimes, like with the first FlexDraper, that's what we did in the early 2000s; it was a niche in soybeans, and the product worked exceptionally well, and it also coincided with an increase in combine capacity, allowing it to grow far more than we realized at that time. We probably won't be so fortunate again, but hopefully, we will find success in a few of these."
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