It’s a short video from 1989 that belongs in a museum. Custom cutter Jim Deibert is sitting in the middle of a wheatfield, halfway out of the cab of his truck, listing off to MacDon’s Tom Fox improvements that he would like made to the company’s prototype header.
Boles’ farm, located near the town of Three Hills about an hour and a half drive northeast of Calgary, has been a host for ongoing MacDon product testing since the early 90s.
“It was me who reached out first to MacDon about the testing. I’ve hardly ever owned a major piece of equipment that I didn’t become involved upstream with the company in some way or another, either in research and development or trying out parts and stuff. Over the years, I’ve worked with New Holland, John Deere, and CLAAS.”
The last time we checked in with Tom Dugan of T&K Red River Dairy [Big Cheese, Performance Magazine, Spring 2012], the large Arizona dairy was milking 9,600 cows daily, representing more than 1,000,000 lbs. of milk off to market every 24 hours. The impressive size of the operation led to Dugan being featured on the cover of Performance standing in one of T&K’s barns with the words “Big Cheese” next to him.
The drought of 1988 reaped heartbreak across the Canadian Prairies. In many places, yields were cut in half, and some farmers were left with nothing to harvest at all. By the end of the year, total crop losses would top $4 billion, and one out of every ten producers would find themselves out of agriculture altogether.
In central Saskatchewan near the town of Govan, Ron Hanmer and his dad had their backs to the wall trying to find a way to cut a crop too light to harvest using their usual methods.
Future ag historians seeking to chronicle the FlexDraper revolution can be forgiven if they begin with the launch of MacDon’s 974 FlexDraper in 2003. But the story really starts more than a decade earlier with the frustrations of Bruce Nelson, and his constant badgering of MacDon to develop a draper header that could harvest his soybeans.
Nelson, a former custom cutter who currently farms about 7,500 acres near Clark, South Dakota, says he remembers back in the early 90s, how much he detested cutting soybeans with the flex auger platforms that were available at the time.
It’s the summer of 2012, and Kandahar, Saskatchewan farmer Dustin Burns is in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He, along with a handful of other producers, is a dinner guest of former MacDon owner Gary MacDonald, who has turned the evening’s conversation to one of his favorite topics.
“Gary went around the table and wanted to hear from everybody in the group, not just those willing to speak up,” recalls Burns of the evening. “It was really important to him to understand how we used MacDon’s equipment, how it affected our lives, our businesses, and our families.”