Well I'm not unfamiliar with farm machinery as it goes, my garden backs onto farm fields so you see the usual tractors, combines and various other machinery floating around - but a crawler combine is a first for me! And apparently, its not alone either. The manufacturer, Claas, makes a small range of these combines. It appears the 600 which I observed today is the largest of the current range. We've had very heavy rainfall at times over the last couple of weeks. Some farms down south have had 40%+ of their crops yield lost due to flooding. The crawler combine idea was designed to reduce ground compaction but I guess it has other uses as well when the ground is still very muddy. http://www.flickr.com/photos/25517093@N06/2867880499/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/25517093@N06/2867873959/
I love the look of that combine! It seems that the boys overseas design/build more useful for farm equipment than some over in the states. I'm not as experienced as most of you with farm equipment, so this is entirely based on my somewhat uneducated background in this area. I am starting to see more of these overseas units around more frequently though and it's always neat to see something different for a change.
I found one up in ND/MN last fall here's the link: http://www.letstalksnow.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18372&highlight=half-track+combine
The Claas product is sold as Cat there in the states. The rubber tracked principle was developed in conjunction with Cat by Claas, it is quite popular here in the uk for it narrow transport width making it suitable for our somewhat more compact highways. On the downside, 1) the last two summers have shown that even the tracked machines will still get bogged down and to a degree when bogged can be a bit harder to remove sometimes 2) the track systems make the purchase price quite expensive ff
I can see your point about the expense side of things, crawler vehicles (military or otherwise) are well known for being more labour intensive than wheeled vehicles (for the most part at least). This is why you get the trend of medium-sized military vehicles being wheeled rather than tracked - cuts down on operating and support costs. I haven't seen another crawler combine since I took the pictures, seen several Claas and a few New Holland's but all conventional wheeled rigs. No Cat or CLAAS Challenger's either...