A sugarcane growing co-operative on the NSW North Coast has invested in a new Case IH Austoft 8810 harvester.
The Banks Estate was formed in 1974 and today has 20 members in the Richmond River cane growing area of Northern NSW, taking in the Broadwater, Woodburn and East Coraki regions.
The co-op's new Austoft is expected to harvest between 80,000 and 110,000 tonnes across the 20 member farms this year.
Jim Sneesby, secretary of Banks Estate Co-op, said it was great to see the new harvester in action.
The new machine was bought from Days Machinery Centre in Casino which started selling the machines last year.
Dealer principal Dan Hoppe said it was satisfying to have the iconic Austoft - a machine invented in Australia and produced here until the mid-1990s - in the Days' machinery stable.
Mr Sneesby said the co-op, which employs five staff during harvest, had always used Case IH harvesters because of the machine's reliability and the great service they'd received from Case IH dealers.
The Case IH Austoft 8010 series was launched into the Australian market in 2018 and was hailed as a major update to the company's sugarcane harvester product offering, with a raft of new features and improvements that came out of more than 18,000 hours of field-testing.
"This new harvester will be working overtime in the coming months with hundreds of hectares to be covered across our members' farms, so we need to know the machine we're using is up to the challenge," Mr Sneesby said.
"And with tonnages lower than we'd like to see for another year (because of drought), the harvester we use has to guarantee the highest possible yields with an emphasis on efficiency and quality."
