10 BIGGEST Combine Harvesters Ever Built

Somewhere in a wheat field right now, a machine the size of a city bus is swallowing grain at a rate of nearly 100 tonnes an hour. And it's not even the biggest one on this list. Today we're counting down 10 of the largest combine harvesters ever built. Machines so wide they're banned from certain roads. A machine that fuses a combine and its own grain cart into one 22-tonne chassis. And the current record holder for the most wheat ever harvested in a single 8-hour shift. Quick note before we get into it. If you want deeper spec breakdowns and early access to upcoming machine comparisons, our channel membership is the place for that. Links in the description. Let's start the countdown. Number 10. Gliener S-98. Most combine manufacturers spend their engineering budget trying to make their machines narrower and simpler. Gliener took a different route entirely. The S-98 runs its rotor sideways, transversely across the machine instead of front to back. A design that's fundamentally different from nearly every other combine on this list. That sideways rotor means crop material never changes direction as it moves through the machine, which cuts down on horsepower demand and fuel use while still producing a clean sample. Power comes from a 9.8-litre rated at 375hp with a maximum boost of 471hp feeding a 390-bushel, about 13,700-litre, grain tank that empties in under 100 seconds. It's also built lighter than most of its competitors, running 10,000 to 12,000 pounds less than comparable combines, which means less soil compaction and less yield loss to tyre tracks next season. Number 9. Rostselmash Torum 785. Russia's largest agricultural manufacturer builds a flagship combine that rarely gets airtime in western farming content, and that's exactly why it's here. The Torum 785 runs on a Cummins six-cylinder engine, putting out up around 510 to 520hp, feeding a 12,000-litre grain tank. What's genuinely impressive isn't just the machine, it's the scale of operation it's built for. A single Torum 785 is rated to work through more than 2,000 hectares in a season. That's roughly 5,000 acres harvested by one machine in one year. At peak output, it can process around 45 tonnes of grain an hour, and Rostselmash builds it with a luxury cab option that rivals anything from the western manufacturers on this list. Climate control, suspension seating, and a cab volume more than 50% larger than their standard model. Number 8. Case IH Axial Flow 925-0. This is the machine that shows up on more American farms than almost anything else on this countdown, and there's a reason for that. Balance. The 925-0 puts out 550hp rated, with a peak of 625hp when it needs it, running through a 16-litre FPT engine. Its grain tank holds 410 bushels, about 14,400 litres, and the whole machine weighs in around 21 tonnes. What sets it apart isn't raw size, though. It's the AFS Harvest Command System, which uses on-board sensors to automatically adjust rotor speed, fan speed, and concave clearance in real-time without the operator touching a dial. Essentially, the combine tunes itself as crop conditions change midfield. For a machine this size, that's the difference between an experienced 20-year operator and a first-season driver getting nearly identical results. Number 7. New Holland CR 10.90. This is the machine that put a Guinness World Record on the board, and it's still one of the most cited combines in agricultural history because of it. On August 15th, 2014, a CR 10.90 harvested 797.656 tonnes of wheat in a single eight-hour shift on a farm in Lincolnshire, England. To put that number in perspective, that's the equivalent of filling roughly 28 articulated truck trailers with wheat in one working day with one machine. Its average throughput that day was 99.7 tonnes an hour, peaking at 135 tonnes an hour, and it did it burning just 1.12 litres of fuel per tonne of grain harvested. The machine itself runs a Cursor 16 engine rated at 653 horsepower in its record-setting configuration, with later production versions pushed up to 700 horsepower, feeding a 14,500 litre grain tank. It's not the biggest machine on this list by size, but it might be the most thoroughly proven, because its numbers were independently verified, not just claimed in a press release. If you're enjoying the scale of these machines so far, this is a good moment to hit like and subscribe. It genuinely helps this kind of content reach more people who are into big machinery. Let's keep going, halfway there. Number six, John Deere X9-1100. John Deere's answer to the biggest combine question was simple, build it wide. The X9-1100 has the widest body of any combine currently on the market, engineered specifically to move more crop material through the machine per second without bottlenecking. It's powered by a 690 horsepower engine and carries a 460 bushel, about 16,210 litre grain tank that can be fully unloaded in roughly 90 seconds, thanks to an unload rate of 5.3 bushels per second. In the field, John Deere claims it can sustain over 100 tonnes of grain per hour while keeping losses under 1%, a combination that's genuinely difficult to hit, because higher throughput usually means more grain gets damaged or lost out the back. The X9 uses onboard cameras and automation to constantly self-correct settings, trying to solve that exact trade-off in real time. Number five, Massey Ferguson Ideal 9T. Underneath the Massey Ferguson badge is a machine built on the same platform as one of Europe's most talked-about combine families. The Ideal 9T runs a 12.4 litre MAN engine producing 647 horsepower, paired with a 17,100 litre grain tank. Genuinely massive for a machine still narrow enough to work comfortably on European farms. Its unloading system moves grain at 210 litres per second, and inside it uses a double-rotor setup, each 600 millimetres in diameter and more than 4.8 metres long, to thresh crop gently enough to avoid cracking or damaging the grain at high volume. It's the kind of machine that proves you don't need American-scale headers to build American-scale power, you just need to engineer the internals more aggressively. Number four, Fendt Ideal 10T. At the top of the platform sits the 10T, and this is where the horsepower numbers start getting genuinely serious. 790 horsepower at maximum output, on par with the most powerful combines ever built. Its grain tank holds around 17,100 litres, roughly 485 bushels, and it can empty that entire tank through its streamer unloading system at six bushels per second. Inside, its dual-rotor processor uses two 24-inch diameter rotors, each nearly 16 feet long, noticeably longer than the nearest competing design, which lets crop materials stay in the threshing system longer at a lower rotational speed. That's gentler on the grain, but it still processes at a scale that most machines simply can't match. On the track-equipped version, Fendt offers rubber tracks up to 36 inches wide, letting a nearly 400 horsepower heavier machine spread its weight across soft or wet ground without compacting it. Number three, Class Lexion 8900. For years, this was the machine that held the unofficial title of the world's biggest combine, and in 2020, Class made that claim official. The Lexion 8900 runs a 16.2-litre MAN engine, putting out 779 max horsepower, and its grain tank holds 510 bushels, roughly 18,000 litres, which it can empty at a rate of 5.1 bushels per second, or about 100 seconds for a full tank. It's exclusively offered with Class's TerraTrack undercarriage, a rubber track system designed to spread that weight out and minimise soil compaction, even on a machine pushing nearly 800 horsepower. Class has been building combines since the 1930s, and the 8900 was actually rolled out to commemorate the company's 500,000th combine produced worldwide, a fairly good indicator of how seriously they take the biggest ever title. Number two, New Holland CR11. Unveiled at Agritechnica in 2023, the CR11 didn't just join the conversation about the world's biggest combine. It was built specifically to end it. It's the only combine that year to win Agritechnica's Gold Innovation Award, and the numbers explain why. A 15.9-litre Cursor 16 engine produces up to 775 horsepower, feeding a 20,000-litre grain tank. That's a 567-bushel capacity, about 25% larger than its own sibling model, the CR10. It's built to run headers up to 61 feet wide, and its unloading system can empty that massive tank at up to 6 bushels per second. New Holland didn't just make the CR11 bigger for the sake of it. Every dimension was scaled specifically to keep pace with headers that keep getting wider every year, so the combine itself doesn't become the bottleneck in the field. Number one, Tribene T1000. Every machine so far on this list is, fundamentally, still a combine. A machine that cuts, threshes, cleans and stores grain. The Tribene T1000 breaks that formula entirely. Instead of building a bigger combine, Tribene's engineers asked a different question. What if the combine and the grain cart were the same machine? The result is a three-module, centre-articulated harvester. Threshing components up front, a massive grain tank built into its own rear section, connected by a steering pivot instead of a rigid frame. That rear tank holds around 1,000 bushels, close to 35,000 litres. Nearly double the capacity of the New Holland CR11 we just covered, and almost three times the size of a class Lexion's tank. Twin 9-litre Cummins engines produce up to 650 horsepower combined, enough to sustain a full day of continuous operation without refuelling, thanks to a 500-gallon onboard fuel tank. It unloads at a staggering 500 bushels per minute through an 8-metre auger, emptying completely in under two minutes. The whole machine weighs somewhere around 22 tonnes, and it steers using a single joystick instead of a traditional wheel. Full-time all-wheel drive, with the rear axle able to pivot independently for crab steering across a field. Because the grain tank travels with the harvester instead of a separate cart, a Tribene operation can, in theory, run without a chaser vehicle or a second driver at all. And that's the list. Ten machines, ten completely different approaches to the same basic question. How much grain can one machine move in a day? If you want to see how these compare against the biggest tractors, haul trucks or mining equipment ever built, that's exactly the kind of content we cover every week here on Giant Force. So hit subscribe if you haven't already, drop a comment with which machine on this list surprised you the most, and we'll see you in the next one.