German firms team up for combine-truck solutions
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Bavaria's Horsch machinery firm is collaborating with trailer manufacturer Fliegl to develop a crawler dolly that can work with a road-going bulk grain trailer at fieldside and hopes to have a commercial model ready by next year
by NORMAN DUNN
Controlled traffic farming (CTF) has definitely caught on in Europe, most of all with the big players in grain production. The Horsch family concern in Bavaria, for instance. This is mainly, of course, a premier machinery manufacturing firm. But the company does run its own test farms, including an 8,000-acre spread in the Czech Republic. Here, conventional CTF currently clashes with combine grain transfer in the field.
Chasers, multi-axle drop-door trailers, even road-going trucks: they're all out on the stubble nowadays, scurrying around trying to keep up with the output of combining giants that can dump over 14 tons at a time into a wagon (e.g. the New Holland 652, JD S690, etc.) and manage that five or six times an hour when the going is good!
Logically, the system calls for the biggest road-going trucks loaded directly by the combine. Maybe this approach could fit into CTF, but there are traction – and compaction – difficulties to think about. Horsch is teaming up with continental trailer manufacturer Fliegl and developing an idea based on this logical combine-truck solution. A tractor-pulled crawler "dolly" is currently on test on the Czech farm. This slides under a road-going bulk grain trailer at the fieldside and hydraulically heaves it off the ground. Attachment points at front and rear keep the trainer steady at speeds of up to 25 m.p.h. across the field.
For extra traction, the dolly is not only pulled but also powered, with tractor-powered hydraulic pumps driving each track. And while Horsch realizes that other farms might have different working widths for their CTF systems, the dolly track width can be changed from the conventional three metres, once again hydraulically and straight from the tractor seat.
The concept is still being worked on. But Horsch says there could well be a commercial development of its crawler dolly on sale from next year.
Cultivation, manure injection and drilling
Looking at the other end of the farming year takes us to seeding time and a development for single-pass establishment with ideal CTF application. This time, the bright ideas come not from multinational manufacturing co-operation, but instead from a single farm contractor business – R.C. Baker of Oxfordshire, England.
Teamed up here are large-capacity (25-30 ton) slurry tankers with slurry injection via attached strip tillage cultivators carrying pneumatic drill systems for simultaneous seed drilling. Seeding canola straight into wheat stubble complete with slurry fertilizer over a six-metre working width is the aim here. But it has to be said that the equipment used is continually being changed and fine-tuned towards a target of smooth and efficient cultivation, slurry injection, crop drilling and reconsolidation in a single seven-m.p.h. operation.
There are a number of R.C. Baker rigs involved, all so far pulled and powered by Claas Xerion 388 HP machines. Behind the tankers can be, for example, X-Till strip cultivators from north German manufacturer Vogelsang. These established 20-centimetre-wide tilled strips with 15-25 centimetres deep tine cultivation, slurry being injected at each tine. A Stocks TurboJet pneumatic drill (Cambridgeshire, England) is so far being tested on strip cultivators, dropping canola seed just before reconsolidation rollers that follow up each tilled strip.
As mentioned, the final lineup isn't yet set in concrete. But, just like the tracked dolly brainwave from Horsch, the savings in farming efficiency are already looking attractive. BF