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Inside the New Leader NL7 with Section Control
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In this episode, Application Specialist, Nate Soltvedt of Riesterer & Schnell sits down with Alex Sellner, Regional Sales Manager at New Leader, to take a closer look at the New Leader NL7 fertilizer spreader mounted on the John Deere 600R chassis.
They break down what sets the NL7 apart—from its ability to spread up to 120 feet wide, increased throughput at higher speeds, and a redesigned stacked spinner system, to its twin rubber belt delivery, stainless steel construction, and low‑maintenance design. The conversation also covers section control, boundary management, and how the NL7 helps keep fertilizer where it belongs—inside the field—while matching today’s wider sprayer passes.
If you’re a large‑acre grower looking to improve efficiency, reduce overlap, and run faster without sacrificing spread quality, this episode offers a practical, in‑field look at what the NL7 was built to deliver.
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Why Riesterer & Schnell?
Riesterer & Schnell, a progressive locally-owned John Deere dealership, has proudly been serving Wisconsin communities since 1931. Because you are committed to your land, we are determined to provide you with the very best in equipment and service. Our specialties are tractors, farm equipment, zero turns, riding lawn mowers, precision farming technology, parts and service.
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Everybody, this is Nate Sultivet with Resturn Schnell, your application specialist. Today I'm joined by Alex Sellner with New Leader, Regional Sales Manager. Alex has been in this role for a few years now, and uh been a great asset for Research Snell. Helps us with uh product knowledge, startups, customer visits, and uh it's been great working with you, Alex. Um thanks, Dave. Today we have the John Deere 600R behind us. It's an NL720 box, and we're gonna be kind of quizzing Alex on what the features are of this TVT. So, Alex, you want to kind of tell us what makes the NL7 different than our standard G4s that we're spec in a lot of machines?
SPEAKER_00So the the biggest thing that everybody's been talking about with the NL7 is the width. This now will throw our core products up to 120 foot wide, uh, which is a big deal to a lot of our large growers and and fertilizer dealerships out there. They wanted to get much wider, they wanted to go much faster. Um, so we increased the width. We also increased the throughput so guys can keep carrying high rates of those high speeds. Uh we also threw section control on this to help everybody get into those pie-shaped corners and odd-shaped fields, that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_01So awesome. Um, what are the high point parts of this box that makes it different in the G4? You know, how can we just go from 90, maybe 80, 90, 100 foot spreading to up to 120? How are we achieving that?
SPEAKER_00So we completely redesigned these spinners. Um, you can now see it's a stack spinner. So the the top one is throwing our our inner pattern, the bottom one is throwing our our uh outer pattern. We're keeping everything much more uh straight and not near as lofted. We do run a spinner speed of 900 RPM, uh, but we don't see any crush because of the actuators and the delivery points to the spinners is much smoother. So a complete redesign to get to those huge whists that we that everybody wants.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um as far as the belt, how has that changed as well?
SPEAKER_00We can see the kind of like twin belt and so we went to a twin belt system, we have left and right, and then we also have a front and back. So on this setup, there is four uh belts. They are a hundred percent rubber uh design now, they're not the belt over chain that we're used to. Um everyone's fear with a straight rubber belt is out slippage. So we put a positive drive cog on there. So think much more of like a skid loader track or quad tracks track or something like that. So now we don't get that slip. Um, we don't have to track belts left and right because there's two and two rows of those teeth in there, so there's no more tracking, there's no slip. It's a much smoother, more efficient way to get fertilizer to the spring.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Yeah, and now if we're going to uh fixed gate height, yep, um, versus that variable that we could change on the G4s and G5s. What's our like maximum throughput on a machine like this?
SPEAKER_00So this bed is set up with 3.7 inches, and it's gonna be uh eight height for all four uh feed gates on that. We did that to increase the throughput. So great example is we can do 600 pounds at 64 pound density 22 mile an hour through this machine at 120 foot, right? At 120. So yeah, coming out the back of this machine is right at 3200 pounds a minute at that speed.
SPEAKER_01Wow, so and we've had conversation with growers on can it really throw 120 foot? And is that always the case, or is there times where we've got to make sure we're you know spreading the right distance? What's what's your experience?
SPEAKER_00Yep. So a huge amount of our core products, a lot of our urea, AMS, uh potash, map, dafts, mes, sense, a lot of those will go that 120. Um, the huge one that everybody talks about is elemental sulfur. That way, that one we can only get to 80 for. Uh, that's just the way that stuff flies. That's all the farther we can get it. Um, but if you get into some lesser quality fertilizer, a lot more fines and stuff, it's very easy to narrow this up to say 110 foot, 90 foot, something like that, so you to make sure everything is in overlapping the correct way and we're not streaking fields.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's the word. So um, yeah. So, what customer do you think would have a huge benefit from this?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, a lot of fertilizer dealers are looking at this uh just for improved efficiencies of less tracks in the fields. They can follow uh sprayer tracks at 120 foot. Um, we see a fair amount of these going into potato fields because of the throughput and the width and the speeds that they can carry. They're not having to modify machines to to gain to that 120 like they were with the G4s and such.
SPEAKER_01So, yeah, and I think too the potatoes, right? Like a lot of times the guys are outlining the fields or on the edges. So with section control, we're not spreading the road or that fence line, we're just spreading the field and the crop.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, and that was a big thing is we wanted to make sure we kept fertilizer inside the field. Um, everyone nowadays is talking about runoff, stuff like that. So the section control keeps keeps everything applied where it needs to be.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, so with section control on the G5s, we've seen situations where we got a lot more moving parts and stuff hackhaming. Yep. Can you give us an overview of how this is different in the G5?
SPEAKER_00Yep. So the G5 had a the whole entire fanframe move left, right, forward, and backwards. You can see this is now solid. So the way we achieve that is we're just changing the drop points of where we're uh dropping the fertilizer on the spinners, and all that is achieved by these chutes up here that are ran by electric actuators. Awesome. So we just all we're doing is just changing the drop point, um, and that affects our width, that it affects our section control, everything like that. It also affects according to rate and speeds. We're constantly moving. If you could put a camera back here, those things are constantly moving to make sure our pattern is as flat as possible as we're running through the feed. Awesome.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, and the belts, uh, like you said, it's not belt over chain, right? So is this gonna be a machine a guy wants to use for spreading lime or gypsum?
SPEAKER_00Nope. So this machine is only for fertilizer. Pellets-wise fertilizer, we can do pellet lime, um, but anything pellets-wise pelletized, we can do ag lime, gypsum, that kind of thing is kind of it's out of the boat. We just we knew we wanted to strict to stay strictly fertilizer only with the machine.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so if that's your growers using that, I mean they'd probably be looking at a G4 or G4 line.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's still always gonna be that market that needs a G4 for ag line or gypsum or compost or whatever. Yeah, um, this is mainly for fertilizer need.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Yeah, I in my opinion, I see this being as pivotable on the dry side as uh exactly on the sprayer side, in my opinion, with section control and the scread width, um, being able to match the sprayers is gonna be a phenomenon. Yes. Yep. So yeah. Is there any other uh cool things you want to point out on this box? Uh and touched on.
SPEAKER_00Yep. So the one thing that we knew we wanted to do too, we made everything out of stainless steel on this. So that includes the bearings, so there's no grease points on this. Um, and we took away the belt over chain so there's no more oiling that chain daily. So now at the end of the day, I mean, besides keeping this clean thing clean and opening up waterfalls, making sure there's no blockages, it's it's almost a maintenance-free bed. So we tried to take a lot of the pinch points away from guys that they complained about, and and maintenance are one of those. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So I think you hit the the main one that we're kind of um encouraging our guys, make sure you're checking the waterfalls, the shoots, because when we start to get buildup, we're gonna have product not diverting properly. So, yep. In order to maintain that good spread better and that retested, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and and all that stuff back there is completely tooless. So while they're waiting on the, you know, waiting for a tender to get there, or at the end of the night while they're fueling up, like something they can do is just pull this inspection ladder out, crawl up there, in a matter of one or two minutes, you got all those wing nuts off, and you're gonna have everything inspected and put back together. So yeah, it's fairly simple. It really is.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. And this all runs through our John Deere Gen 5 displays. So anyone that's used to running the spreaders before, it's very similar. Look, it's got ISO bus on it, but new leader did a phenomenal job of making sure that it was well laid out, easy to use. Um integrated. Yeah, I would say there's like five buttons that you're gonna use on primarily one page to switch width or switch products and rates and density. So yep. You guys did a nice job with that.
SPEAKER_00Yep, we tried to make sure everything that the consumer needed in a day-to-day basis was within five five button pushes. Yeah. So we tried to get rid of the clunkiness of of all the ISOs that we've came out before, and we tried to streamline it as much as possible.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, as I said too, with the integration, we're gonna be able to use our boundaries. So anyone using satellite or radio base RTK boundaries, we're able to put that in and make sure this machine's shutting off face end boundaries as well. So putting that fertilizer exactly where you need it to mix that. Yep. So awesome. I think that's everything I have for questions. Um, appreciate you coming out and uh going through this with us. Um, to you viewers, if you have any additional questions, please reach out to uh one of your local Research and Snell locations. We'd love to talk to you about it. Thank you. We're your John Deere dealer coming through for you, Roosterer and Schnell.