New Holland’s inventive engineering capabilities and expertise in developing solutions to the most significant operational challenges faced by farmers worldwide have been recognized with two Silver Medals at the prestigious Agritechnica Innovation Awards. Agritechnica is the world’s largest farm equipment exhibition and will take place in Hanover, Germany, from November 9-15, 2025.
The two Silver Medals were awarded to New Holland’s Corn Header Automation and ForageCam™ technologies. Both features are industry firsts that automate key harvesting processes. They offer a clear demonstration of how technology can support farmers by reducing manual touchpoints, maximizing output and lowering fuel consumption. All while contributing to improved productivity and a more sustainable agricultural industry.
Corn Header Automation makes automatic adjustments to enhance harvesting performance
Corn Header Automation integrates advanced automation and artificial intelligence into combine corn headers, making it the most sophisticated corn header technology available today. Designed to empower operators of all skill levels, it helps maximize harvest efficiency by reducing crop losses, boosting throughput, cutting fuel costs and eliminating manual adjustments. This helps farmers by saving both time and money, while ensuring consistently high performance.
Advanced sensing and control systems are also utilized by Corn Header Automation to optimize harvesting performance in real-time. These systems include deck plate automation that adjusts the gap between plates based on crop conditions, as well as stalk processing automation that controls stalk roll speed and header attack angle to match crop moisture, stalk condition and field variability. Multiple shatter sensors enable real-time feedback and closed-loop control for header settings, while ground speed matching synchronizes header processing with combine ground speed to optimize throughput and reduce crop losses.
ForageCam brings intelligent crop monitoring and advanced automation to forage harvesting
Complete cracking and processing of all corn kernels is crucial when harvesting corn for silage. This ensures livestock consuming the silage can fully access its valuable energy and nutrients during the digestive process, which, ultimately, supports higher quality milk and meat production. Setting the kernel processor has traditionally been done manually, using time-consuming and retrospective measurements to assess processing performance, leaving little to no opportunity to influence crop quality during harvest.
The ability to better address this crop quality issue is changing with the New Holland ForageCam development. This solution uses a spout-mounted camera to continuously analyze crop flow images and detect kernel fragments to assess processing efficacy; this is linked to a Kernel Processing Score, a measure to assess the processing quality. ForageCam actively drives machine adjustments, ensuring the system automatically modifies processing parameters to achieve the desired forage quality. This continuous, in-cab monitoring and adjustment automation capability represents a significant step forward in this segment.
The innovation of ForageCam underscores New Holland’s commitment to designing solutions that improve agronomic outcomes, delivering smarter technology that prioritizes nutritional outcomes and optimizes forage quality for specific requirements. ForageCam will be available on New Holland Forage Harvesters beginning September 2026.