Three-mower system can cut up to 65 acres an hour

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

But cutting up to 54 feet in one pass requires a well-equipped, high-horsepower tractor and it doesn't come cheap

by MIKE MULHERN


Whether you're cutting dry hay for baling or wet hay for silage or haylage, there are machines out there that will cut up to 65 acres an hour.

One of the biggest on the market for dry hay is the creation of a Canadian company, PhiBer Manufacturing Inc., of Crystal City, Man. PhiBer builds a tool bar that will manage three New Holland or MacDon mowers for a 54-foot cut.

The dealers sell the mowers which they attach to the tool bar PhiBer manufactures. The cost for the tool bar alone is $165,000 if you're attaching three sickle mowers and $190,000 if you're adding three disc mowers. Adding the mowers will bring the total to about $225,000 for the sickle setup and about $250,000 for the disc mowers.

Derek Friesen, PhiBer's vice-president of marketing and product development, says it sounds like a lot but, when compared to three self-propelled windrowers, it's not. Besides, he says, fuel costs are cut by 70 to 80 per cent compared to doing the job with self-propelled units. Tractors powering the triple mowers must have front and rear three-point hitch and power take-off.  Horsepower requirements vary from 180 PTO horsepower to 280 PTO horsepower.

Friesen says PhiBer has been building the tool bars since 2008. They are finding that sickle systems will cover about 40 acres an hour and disc mower systems up to 65 acres.

If you're cutting for silage or haylage, New Holland's MegaCutter will realistically mow up to 43 acres an hour, says Gary Wojcik, brand marketing manager for New Holland hay and forage crop preparation products. "Forty-three acres an hour is reasonable if the land is smooth," he says. He adds that rougher terrain will reduce the number of acres.

To make the three-machine cutting system work, you need a tractor with front and rear PTO combined with front and rear three-point hitch. Wojcik says the company recommends a minimum of 195 PTO horsepower.  Up front, there is a disc mower-conditioner that is 11-feet-five-inches wide. In the rear, a frame is set up with a central gearbox and two independent disc mower-conditioners, each 10-feet-six-inches wide. Together, the mowers cover a swath that is 29.5 feet wide.

Wojcik says the MegaCutter, which has a manufacturer's suggested retail price of $92,635 in Canada, is not designed for dry hay but for alfalfa or an alfalfa-hay mixture to make silage or haylage. "It is not for dry hay," he says, "it is for wet haylage."

Typically, Wojcik says, the cutter operation would be followed by a merger operation to bring the material into one or more windrows, depending on the merger. The rows would then be picked up by a self-propelled forage harvester.

One of the MegaCutter's features is a breakaway mechanism. If either of the rear wings hits an object in the field, such as a rock, that wing pulls back and up automatically to go over the object and then returns to place and continues cutting. Wojcik says it will not go over an object as high as a fence post, but it will go over something like a protruding rock of about a foot.

"Other brands have a breakaway mechanism," Wojcik says, "but this one will reset automatically without stopping. That's a big selling point." BF