FIRST DAY of 2025 Corn Planting with JOHN DEERE 9R 440 Tractors

Hi Big Tractor Power fans. This video comes to you from a field located in western Kentucky where a pair of 440 engine horsepower John Deere 9R 440 tractors are planting corn with 60-foot-wide John Deere 1775NT 24-row 30-inch space corn planters. In this video, we'll spend some time out in the field taking a look at the preparation of the ground as corn planting begins, looking at primary tillage from last fall and secondary tillage this spring. The tractors that are planting the corn are John Deere 9R 440s. They are manufactured in Waterloo, Iowa and were introduced for model year 2021 and remain current products in 2025. They're powered by 13.6-liter, 827-cubic-inch John Deere 14-liter, 6-cylinder, 24-valve, liquid-cooled engines. Rated at 440 horsepower, they can achieve up to 484 horsepower when they need to power through tough field conditions and offer 335 PTO horsepower. They're fitted with 400 gallon diesel fuel tanks and a 31.7 gallon diesel exhaust fluid tank for clean engine solutions. They feature a John Deere E18 full power shift transmission with 18 forward and 6 reverse speeds, which allow the tractors to travel from 2.5 up to 25 mph. When they roll off the assembly line, they weigh in at 45,980 pounds and can be fully field-weighted up to 62,000 pounds. According to JohnDeere.com, the base list price for a 9R 440 in 2025 is $604,157. When they're equipped with a Category 4 three-point hitch, the price increases by $35,131. And when they're equipped with triple tires, like the models working in this video, the price is an additional $19,786. These articulated machines are equipped with 12 tires to carry the weight of the two 500-gallon Chemfarm tanks mounted on the front of the tractors that carry a total of 1,000 gallons of nitrogen. They're operating 24-row, 30-inch spaced corn planters that are 60 feet wide. It's a model John Deere 1775NT, which is equipped with an additional 600-gallon chemical tank. The planter holds 130 bushels of corn seed. The wings flex up and down 21 degrees and they fold up to 12 feet wide. John Deere manufactures its corn planters in Moline, Illinois. According to the company's website, for model year 2025, a 1775NT Exact Emerge corn planter has a base list price of $461,975. Before the corn planting season, the field starts out with primary tillage in the fall. Here we can see the farm's two 9R 440s and a 9410R articulated four-wheel drives working with John Deere 915V Rippers. Equipped with seven shanks spaced at 24 inches apart, they're working 16 inches down on the ground to break up compaction. This was a winter wheat field in June that had soybeans no-tilled in right behind the combines, and those soybeans were harvested in October. And then the farm works on primary tillage right behind the combines as they wrap up in November. With two crops on one field in the season, there's a lot of compaction from the grain drills, planters, sprayers, combines, and grain carts, and the V Ripper does an excellent job of breaking up the soil underneath while leaving the surface John Deere 8R 340 tractors operating 39 foot wide Kelly 4012 Diamond Harrows. The discs on these harrows simply work up an inch deep in the ground, cutting and mixing the winter wheat residue and soybean stubble into the ground and smoothing out the ridges left by the V Rippers to make a planting corn with the John Deere 9R 440 tractor and 1775NT corn planter. As the tractor and planter run across the field, we can see that there is really minimal evidence of where the tractor has ran versus the rows. The triple tires do a very nice job in avoiding that compaction, which is important for the seed growth, and we can turn around here and look at it in this direction. Again, you don't see those tire prints from the tractor. Here we can see the tractor coming across the point rows, and now does this planter shut off on the boundary? Yes, it does. So it knew to shut them off. How do you like this tractor as a planter tractor? I noticed when it was going up the hill there, it knew the planter was back there. It's a lot to pull, a lot of weight to pack around. Do you find the triple tires give it a good ride when you're out in the field compared to if you're just running duals? Oh yeah, it rides much better. How many acres do you get covered in an hour if everything's going pretty well? It's definitely covering some acres. You've got an auto steer where I saw the sharp curve come up, but it actually is able to steer around these corners. That's some pretty impressive technology. But for the corners, it hasn't quite got it down yet, but maybe someday. That's right. So here we can see the rows coming on as it comes across the point, and it has to overlap just a little bit. Does having the big tanks up front let's you get a lot of acres as far as fertilizer before refills? Oh yeah. 1500 gallons, put 1500 gallons. I'd like to stop and pull it up. Well that's nice because the fertilizer goes a lot faster than the seed, so it's good to have to try to just stop and fill up all at once. Here we can see the row units coming on in the next field as it starts out on that first pass, and we can see it starting to map the seed going in the ground. I hope that you've enjoyed spending some time out in the field with these John Deere tractors working on corn planting. I would like to hear in the comment section below this video, if you raise corn on your farm, tell me about the tractor and corn planter that you're running this spring. If you have appreciated this presentation, I hope you'll consider subscribing to Big Tractor Power YouTube where there's over 3,000 videos of farm machines in action. As always, thank you for watching.