John Deere introduced the wide-body 9000 series foragers in 2018. We have been keeping tabs on one 9700i for the past two seasons to see how it’s performing
When the forage harvester stops, everything else grinds to a halt, so it’s quite understandable that owners have high demands for their harvester’s reliability and the back-up from the dealer. Over the 850 hours clocked so far, our test machine owner has not had any harvest downtime during the busy and short maize season, which makes up the most of this chopper’s workload. Nevertheless, there’s still some criticism of the machine …
but we’ll come to that later.
With the recent changes to Deere’s 9000 series forager line-up (see last month’s issue), the 9700i becomes the middle model in the five-model range and the smallest to use the 24-litre, Liebherr V12. Our owner opted for a 9700 as he wanted to up the capacity for his biogas maize customers, who demand short chop lengths and intensive processing.
