The 3 Biggest Farm Machines Ever Built

This machine weighs 100,000 pounds. Its tires are taller than you. It was built in 1977 and nothing, nothing built since has ever matched its size. These are the 3 biggest agricultural machines ever put on a field. Let's go. Big Bud 16V747-1977, Havre, Montana. Two cotton farmers in California had a problem. Elmer and Melvin Rossi were running 35,000 acres of cotton in Bakersfield. Their soil was compacted, hard, dead. Roots couldn't penetrate. To fix it, they needed a machine that could pull a subsoiler 50 centimeters deep through rock hard California soil across thousands of acres. No machine on the market could do it, so they commissioned one. Ron Harmon and his team at Northern Manufacturing built something the world had never seen. They called it the Big Bud 16V747 and it cost $300,000 in 1977 money. That's over $1.5 million today. Let's talk about what's under the hood. A Detroit Diesel 16V92T engine, 16 cylinders, 2 turbochargers, 2 superchargers, 24.12 liters of displacement, power output, 1,100 horsepower. But here's the number that separates this machine from everything else. It weighs 100,000 pounds fully loaded. 100,000 pounds. That's 45 metric tons. The weight of 30 full grown elephants standing on 4 tires. And those tires? They're not standard. The Big Bud runs on custom rubber measuring 8 feet tall and nearly 40 inches wide. Each tire alone is taller than the average American man. They were manufactured specifically for this machine by United Tire Company in Canada. When that company shut down in the year 2000, the Big Bud literally ran out of replacement tires. For years, it sat idle, loaned to agricultural museums in Iowa, a legend collecting dust. Then, in July 2020, the Williams Brothers, the machine's current owners in Big Sandy, Montana, found a solution. Custom adapted Goodyear LSW tires, slightly lower than the originals. In September 2020, the Big Bud returned to the field, 43 years after it was built, still working. On a good day, the Big Bud pulls an 80 foot cultivator that's wider than a basketball court is long, at speeds up to 8 miles per hour. It covers more than an acre per minute. For a machine that runs on pure mechanical brute force, no GPS, no AI, no autonomous systems, that number is extraordinary. Everything about this tractor is analog, mechanical, raw, no touchscreen, no autopilot, just steel, diesel, and 1,100 horses doing what they were built to do. No tractor built for mass production has ever matched the Big Bud's weight class. 47 years later, it still holds the title. The king nobody dethroned. If this is blowing your mind, smash that like button and drop a comment. Did you know the Big Bud was still working in 2020? Because the next machine is a completely different kind of giant. New Holland CR11. The Big Bud is big because of brute force. The New Holland CR11 is big because of what it can process. Built in Zettelgem, Belgium, the CR11 is the largest production combined harvester ever manufactured. And unlike the Big Bud, which was a one-off custom build, the CR11 is a production machine. You can actually buy one, if you have the money. At its core, it's an FPT Cursor 16 engine, 15.9 liters, 6 cylinders, producing 775 horsepower. But the engine isn't the headline here. The headline is the header. The CR11 can run a 18 meters. That's 60 feet. That's wider than a Boeing 737 is long. In one single pass through a wheat field, this machine cuts a swath that would have taken 50 men with scythes an entire day to cover. Here's where the CR11 earns the title of biggest. Its grain tank holds 20,000 liters. That's 567 bushels of grain sitting in one machine. And when it's time to unload, it empties at 210 liters per second. The entire 20,000 liter tank is empty in under 100 seconds. That's faster than most combines can even start their unload system. But the CR11's real advantage isn't size. It's what happens inside. The twin clean system uses two sequential cleaning shoes, not one like conventional combines, with pressure sensors monitoring grain load in real time. When the machine works on a hillside and grain shifts to one side, robotic actuators physically shake the grain pan in the opposite direction. It's self-correcting in real time while moving. And the Intellia spread system uses continuous wave radar at the rear of the machine to monitor how the chopped straw is being spread behind it. Wind gusts, humidity changes, crop variations. The system detects all of it and automatically adjusts the deflectors to maintain perfectly even coverage across the full 18 meter width. Why does that matter? Because uneven straw spreading creates uneven soil conditions for the next planting. That costs yield. The CR11 solves that problem without the operator touching anything. The Big Bud is 1977 technology at its absolute peak. The CR11 is 2024 technology at its absolute peak. One runs on raw mechanical power. The other runs on artificial intelligence and radar. Both are giants, but they represent completely different eras of agricultural engineering. But there's a third machine, and it doesn't fit into either category because it solved a problem neither the Big Bud nor the CR11 ever addressed. Tribine T1000. Here's something most people don't know about large scale harvesting. When a conventional combine works a field, it doesn't work alone. It needs a grain cart, a massive tractor-pulled trailer, running alongside it constantly to receive the grain as the combine's tank fills up. That grain cart needs a tractor to pull it. That tractor and cart are heavy, very heavy, and they drive through the field back and forth all day every day during harvest. The result, severe soil compaction, not from the combine, from the support vehicles. Studies show that traditional harvest systems compact 70 to 80% of a field's soil every season. That compaction costs yield year after year. Nobody had solved this problem until a team in Newton, Kansas tried something radical. What if you combined the combine and grain cart into one single machine? One chassis, one operator, no support vehicles in the field. That's the Tribine T1000. Two Cummins engines, one dedicated entirely to the threshing system, one dedicated to propulsion. Combined output, 650 continuous horsepower. Grain tank capacity, 35,239 liters, 1,000 bushels. That's more than one and a half times the CR11's tank. Unload rate, 300 liters per second. The entire 1,000 bushel tank empties in under two minutes. And the fuel tank, 500 gallons, enough for 24 hours of continuous operation without stopping. The Tribine runs on four identical low sidewall tires, each over a meter wide, designed to spread the machine's weight across the maximum possible surface area. Ground pressure is kept low enough that soil compaction is dramatically reduced compared to conventional harvest systems. And because there's no tractor and grain cart driving through the field, the number of passes on the soil drops by more than half. Research shows this translates to a 2-3% increase in crop yield. Simply from reducing compaction on a 10,000 acre corn operation at 300 bushels per acre, a 2% yield increase is 60,000 additional bushels. At $4.50 per bushel, that's $270,000 in additional revenue. Every single season, from just reducing tire traffic on the soil, in high yield cornfields producing 300 bushels per acre, the Tribine T1000 can make a complete pass of more than a quarter mile without stopping to unload. A conventional combine would need to stop and or be serviced by a grain cart multiple times in that same distance. Fewer stops, fewer support vehicles, less compaction, more grain, more profit. Quick pause. If this is changing how you think about harvest systems, hit that like button and make sure you're subscribed, because we need to talk about what these three machines actually mean for the future of farming. Three machines, three completely different eras of engineering. The big bud, pure mechanical force, nothing electronic, just 1,100 horsepower doing the impossible. The CR-11, artificial intelligence running at harvest speed. The thinking machine, the Tribine, the one that solved the problem the other two created. That's what engineering at the extreme looks like. Drop a comment. Which one surprised you most? The big bud that still runs after 47 years, the CR-11's radar system, or the Tribine eliminating the grain cart entirely? And watch the video on screen right now. It's about machines that replace 1,000 workers each. Same channel, same level of insane.