wet harvest conditions

[eppie]

Hey people,

How do you guys deal with wet harvest conditions??

The contractor where my brother works, has an old 4x4 army truck on big tires. It can handle quite some mud, but it costs lots of transmissions and wheel hubs.

Another guy made a high unloading silage wagon, he uses the ground speed PTO of his 160 hp Ursus to drive the axle of the silage wagon. That axle original came from a Liebherr 900 excavator, which is driven via the third gear of a transmission from a Mercedes 1303 truck.

Bomech, a Dutch firm, makes the 'superbunker' which may contain 50 m³ of maize silage, and its wheels are driven by a 150 hp John Deere diesel. It is hung behind the forest harvester.
www.bomech.nl click 'superbunker'

How do you guys deal with wet harvesting conditions??
Or dont you have wet autumns in the rest of the world??

[paddyland]

Most contractors or large famrs i have come across either use flotation tyres on the trailers or a smallish trailerbehind a silly sized tractor and then just drag it round the field. Trailers do get a raw deal when it comes to getting looked after.

The trailer tends to get dropped at the headland and picked up by smaller tractors and carted off. Although some use scissor type tipping trailers to fill other trailers or lorries

[eppie]

Have you seen the CLAAS special products?? choppers with a tandem and a big bunker on it. Also with a truck trailer attachment.

www.claas.de/produktseiten/produkte/special_products/de/index.php

[Laapa]

Is the superbunker the one sometimes mounted on a Vredo toolcarrier (Terra-Variant-type-vehicle) with a forager in the front?

For wet harvesting, mainly sugarbeet, we buildt this high-dump trailer with big tyres last summer.
Nothing fancy, just a pair of big old (airplane i think) tyres, to keep it floating. Works really well tough. Leaves very little footprints. Tractor (BM800) have wide Trelleborg rear tyres.

(the URL of theese pics are huge. Just click on the yellow stuff...)

photos.yahoo.com/bc/laapa/vwp?.dir=/Farm&.src=ph&.dnm=beettrailer+finnished.jpg&.view=t&.done=http%3a//photos.yahoo.com/bc/laapa/lst%3f%26.dir=/Farm%26.src=ph%26.view=t

photos.yahoo.com/bc/laapa/vwp?.dir=/Farm&.src=ph&.dnm=beets+rearend.jpg&.view=t&.done=http%3a//photos.yahoo.com/bc/laapa/lst%3f%26.dir=/Farm%26.src=ph%26.view=t


By the way, working on a new website for peaharvester-enthusiasts. Might find some rainy-day pics on it.
Just got it started the other day so it is a (slow) work in progress:

www.fmcheroes.tk

[Si]

Lappa we have Peaviners near us, if you want I can take some photos and send them to you. (FMC & Ploeger)
Cheers
Simon

[[e-mail]]

Renze

We don't really have too much in terms of wet harvests around here. Last fall was the worst in a long time though, and yes we were slipping around and making tracks, especially with sugar beets. But our idea of a wet fall is what you consider a normal fall.

We have good tiled fields here - thats the biggest thing. We can get 1 inch of rain, and be on the field within 24-36 hours and not notice it.

The basic rule around here is "if the dust ain't flying - its not worth trying" - we will always get a week or two of good weather from October to December.

[Laapa]

Si, that would be great! There will be a lot more to the website soon, when I get the time to do it right.

www.fmcheroes.tk

A popular choice for trailers is the Metsjö-trailer company.
their website:

www.ivarssonsimetsjo.se/

is not yet available in English but click around and you will see some trailers with big tyres. (they also manufactur the trailers we use when harvesting peas)

[eppie]

Hey laapa,

I checked out your beet harvesting picture gallery on Yahoo.

Do you have that leaf cutter mounted on the front loader of that Deere?? is it hydraulic driven?

[leemsutton]

Wet harvest conditions are generally dealt with by using very large tyres on the tractors and the trailers or replacing the wheeled tractor with a tracked machine.

However most farmers dont harvest wheat etc until it about the right moisture content (under 15%). We have harvested at 25% but nothing any more than that as the drying costs would be to high.

Root crops are harvested over the wet months and low ground compaction equipment is used.

Lee

[Laapa]

Hey Renze

Yes, the defoilator ("Leaf cutter") is mounted on a Trima loader and hydraulicaly powered.
Not the greatest system really, a 3pt in the front would propably work better.
Visibility of the defoliator is poor and any slight adjustments in heigt with the the loader-controll-stick  is amplified by to the defoliator. If one moves the stick just a little bit too much forward the defoliator will be crushed into the ground like a tincan!

Our old lifter had the defoilator mounted on the right side of the harvester and powered by the pto, thus you had to cut the leafs of the outside 3 rows first before any beetlifting could be done.
The old system was really better actually, the leafs were removed from the beet in the previous pass and visibility was a great bit better. Also the old defoiator required a lot less attention.

[eppie]

Hey guys, i just saw on my way to school this morning, that the contractor with the Bomech superbunker now has his single axle traded for a self propelled articulated bunker. It was still hooked on to the self propelled forage harvester, but the pull beam was just to steer the bunker. I saw a hydraulic cylinder on the pivot of the bunker, so it is probably power steered.

Renze