Things have come a long way since the 80's where we ran 1480 IH's with 24 foot heads doing 1.5 mph combing 110 bushel per acre wheat in arizona, but the 240 acres per day per machine was done on dry land stuff in high gear and about 10 plus miles per hour on poor wheat in texas, colorado and montana where it yielded less than 10 bushels per acre, sure brought back some memories, today there are a few headers running at or over 40 foot, times change and so do the machines I guess.
We ran an experimental deere back then that if put into production would have been the largest in the world, back then it had a 50 foot head and a 600 bushel grain tank on it and was doing over 5 mph in the same wheat we were doing 1.5 with the IH's. Today that might be a normal sized machine, but back then it was considered too large to put into production, nobody would buy one was the thinking, deere also ran some experimental rotaries, not bad machines for the time, too bad all those pattens were taken and they couldn't put it into production, but instead they came out with 9000 series machine, we also ran those and at the time were not impressed at all, haven't been since they went into production either, but they did improve them some over the experimental machines we ran, those were a total disaster in our opinion.