New Holland TR97 completes its last job

Originally published in Farm Weekly 8 January 2026.

Hugh, Pete and Wendy Norris' New Holland TR combines.

Grain grower Hugh Norris crops with his parents, Pete and Wendy, at Fairfax Farms, located on the outskirts of Geraldton.

"We grow wheat, canola, and do the odd bits of lupin and oats for hay – all up we crop about 2000 hectares a year," Mr Norris said.

Pete and Wendy first got into the cropping game in 2009. One trusty harvester they have been using for the past few seasons has been a 1994 New Holland TR97.

The TR models came out of North America as a twin rotor model, and were well-regarded for being able to tackle any crop, producing large amounts of centrifugal force, creating grain-on-grain threshing, superior grain quality and high performance in small grains.

The first TR model, the TR 70 came out in 1975, equipped with a 145-horsepower engine and a 5,500 litre grain tank. This model was replaced by the TR75 in 1979. For a few decades, the TR was the standard New Holland harvester model, with some tinkering and improvements made along the way in regards to horsepower and capacity, until it underwent a total redesign in 2002 into the CR model most graingrowers are familiar with today.

Although it has served their cropping programs well over the years, the Norris' TR97 just completed its final harvest for this season, where its engine ticked over 9250 hours.

"Our farm has gotten to the point where we now need a bit more efficiency, so we're planning to fully upgrade all the headers; we'll probably just go for two big headers at this stage," he said.

Mr Norris reflected on how they first acquired the New Holland TR97.

"We bought it third-hand from a farming family in Three Springs in 2014," he said.

"We've got about three New Holland headers, including a TR89 and a TR99."

Mr Norris said the TR97 had been holding up "pretty well" over the last few seasons.

In the 2017 harvest, the machine covered 2000 hectares without assistance from another header.

"That year, we had taken on another lease and didn't really have the capital to upgrade or get another header for that year," he said.

The machine performed ably, getting all the crop in, however, some issues with the motor were becoming apparent.

"We did a motor rebuild at the end of 2018; we had pulled the motor out, and so it had missed out on the 2019 harvest, which is the only harvest that header missed out as far as we know," he said.

"It wasn't easy to source parts for it, but we sent it off to a local mechanic who managed to do the motor rebuild on it.

"Luckily, 2019 was sort of a bad year for everyone around, so we used the TR99, which we bought in 2017."

Despite the difficulty in sourcing the parts for the TR97 motor rebuild, the total cost still ended up being fairly cheap, "especially compared to the new ones," Mr Norris said.

The Norris' harvest wrapped up December 21.

"That's been our latest finish since 2017," he said. The yield for wheat was the Norris' best on record, netting 4 tonnes per hectare.