 | Home > Pictures & Video > And we're off...Harvest '16! Post your harvest pics... |
 
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| Green Machine Member Since: 19 Nov 2010 Location: North Yorkshire Posts: 1226   
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Love it! And we have matching Land Rovers (except mine's a Td5). Off topic: can you tell me what tyre size / spacers you're running? I'm guessing 265/75/16 with 30mm spacers? 2005 Td5 | 90 Station Wagon | Tonga Green
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19th Jul 2016 8:26pm |
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| LoveTheMud Member Since: 19 Feb 2015 Location: Weybridge Surrey & Pontefract West Yorkshire Posts: 411 
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I thought it was all automated these days, good to see biological bits behind the wheels!
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19th Jul 2016 8:45pm |
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| JOW240725 Member Since: 04 May 2015 Location: Suffolk Posts: 7873 
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Shhh not harvest yet I have grain stores still to be finished!!! James
MY2012 110 2.2TDCi XS SW Orkney Grey - http://www.defender2.net/forum/topic43410.html MY1990 110 200TDi SW beautifully faded Portofino Red - https://www.defender2.net/forum/post743641.html#743641 MY1984 90 V8 Slate Grey - https://www.defender2.net/forum/post744557.html#744557 Instagram @suffolk_rovers |
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19th Jul 2016 8:48pm |
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| Captain Speaking Member Since: 23 Jan 2012 Location: Oxfordshire Posts: 159
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Exactly right! |
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19th Jul 2016 9:15pm |
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| Cupboard Member Since: 21 Mar 2014 Location: Suffolk Posts: 2971 
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We haven't finished silage yet, the Big X was out nibbling some wholecrop barley today.
And I still haven't fixed the auto contour on the combine  
Captain Speaking: unusual to see a Cat telehandler on a farm, at least round here. They're mostly JCBs with a few Manipoos and Merlos. Is it any good? |
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19th Jul 2016 9:34pm |
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| DRW58 Member Since: 23 Feb 2013 Location: Perthshire Posts: 167  
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There was a crop being harvested beside us yesterday which I thought was barley but it wasn't anywhere near ripe and it went whole onto the trailers like silage.
I'm almost certain it wasn't grass it had been sown in the spring and was a uniform height and had a barley like head with the long tips to the seed. Anyone care to put me right and hazard an idea what it was, bearing in mind I'm near Perth in Scotland and our harvest is still weeks away despite the heat over the last two days. DRW I built a garage for my Mini With a place for everything and everthing in its place. Ten years down the line there's a Mini in there somewhere, and  all's where it should be!!!! Ho hum |
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19th Jul 2016 9:49pm |
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| JOW240725 Member Since: 04 May 2015 Location: Suffolk Posts: 7873
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DRW58, sounds like whole crop barley or Rye, used to fed AD plants, becoming a popular alternative to maize. Cupboard will probably tell you a lot more. James
MY2012 110 2.2TDCi XS SW Orkney Grey - http://www.defender2.net/forum/topic43410.html MY1990 110 200TDi SW beautifully faded Portofino Red - https://www.defender2.net/forum/post743641.html#743641 MY1984 90 V8 Slate Grey - https://www.defender2.net/forum/post744557.html#744557 Instagram @suffolk_rovers |
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19th Jul 2016 10:03pm |
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| Swac3 Member Since: 21 Feb 2015 Location: Aberdeen Posts: 363 |
Way ahead of the fields up here.. 3 Landrovers
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19th Jul 2016 10:31pm |
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| custom90 Member Since: 21 Jan 2010 Location: South West, England. Posts: 19568
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Some done last week near me, lots to go still now too.
Would have liked to have done a bit of Agri work myself but nerver had the chance, not with the locals that have comendeered everyhing for a lifetime. 
Are most machines now auto box ? |
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19th Jul 2016 10:45pm |
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| Pickles Member Since: 26 May 2013 Location: Melbourne Posts: 3753  
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TOP images Captain.
How wide is the comb on that Header?..I think I've see some 60' ones in Aussie, and some BIG tractors,..up to 700HP! Thanks, Pickles.. |
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19th Jul 2016 11:14pm |
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| Riverboy Member Since: 16 May 2016 Location: French sector, Earth Posts: 1288 
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Much of the lavender has been harvested already here and it's too early for olives and grapes. We just have so sit under a shady tree and wait whilst we sample a previous years harvest.
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19th Jul 2016 11:22pm |
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| PCA42 Member Since: 15 Jun 2014 Location: Church Stretton Posts: 468  
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Those are some big toys to play with!
Pete
2010 Discovery 4 GS TDV6 1972 Series III 88" 2.25P |
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20th Jul 2016 11:09pm |
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| Cupboard Member Since: 21 Mar 2014 Location: Suffolk Posts: 2971
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I can't really add much more than that! It sounds like wholecrop barley or rye. You can feed cows with it too. The stuff we were harvesting earlier this week was actually rye (oops) belonging to a neighbor that was far too far gone and bunged the cutter up (and caught fire), bunged the forager up (and didn't catch fire), was almost impossible to clamp because it was too dry and then got tied round the loader on the clamp and caught light there three times. Not a good day for all concerned! They gave up in the end. Meanwhile I spent hours digging a hole to find a leaking hot water pipe before deciding that hiring a digger was a much better option 
Our clamps are all multipurpose varieties that feed both the AD plant and our cows, the cows get the best stuff, have it for about 36 hours and then poo it out for the AD plant. The silage from the top and the sides of the clamp (which is still very good, just not quite as good) goes in the digester. Nice thing about the wholecrop for us is that we usually harvest it very early and then get three crops in two years, so a winter barley, harvest that about now, straight in the the drill for rye, harvest that late May/early June, then a quick maize and harvest that in October. Rye has slightly lower gas yield per acre than maize but it spreads out the risk and the harvest period. We also feed beet in the winter for the same reason. Our AD plant is a farm-sized one so much smaller than some of the massive great industrial ones, and as a result it fits in to the farm and the village much better. We're making use of waste* in one area of the enterprise to fuel another, and the products of each area all support each other. The cows produce slurry and milk, the milk makes cheese and the residue is whey, the whey and the slurry both go in to the digester with some crop and some crop waste, the digester produces biogas and digestate, the digestate goes back on the crops and provides about half our fertiliser inputs, the biogas is burnt in an engine that produces heat and electricity, the electricity runs the farm and the cheesemaking, the heat keeps us all warm, provides warm water for the cows and all the heat for making cheese (a lot)... etc. We don't run a tanker up and down the road as a lot of people do, as far as we're concerned that's a waste of diesel, man and tractor hours and clogs up the roads. Instead we pump the digestate through our irrigation main with an electric pump (powered by renewable electricity) and the tractor and tanker stay in the field which is where tractors are designed to be. We've been gradually electrifying things round the farm, the irrigation pump, beet chopper etc. to reduce our diesel consumption and now run two electric cars too. Next step is hopefully a plug in hybrid telehandler that Merlo have been talking about for ages but haven't actually released yet. *Calling things waste is tricky. Slurry is obviously waste from the cows' perspective but is food for the digester. How you classify things and how the government classify things are often at odds with each other, and we have some products that are classified as waste by one part of government, and product, co-product or residue by another. The issue comes with the permitting and handling of it. Handling a "product" is much easier than handling or spreading a "waste" and if you get the paperwork wrong you can get in all sorts of bother. |
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21st Jul 2016 8:35am |
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| Cupboard Member Since: 21 Mar 2014 Location: Suffolk Posts: 2971
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If you're talking about the gearboxes, yes and no. Things are tending to move away from automated powershifts actually, our main tractors for 15 years have all been CVTs so no gears at all. A tractor gearbox for a basic tractor like our little McCormick might have four powershift gears in each of four ranges, forwards and backwards. So to pull away with a big trailer you'll start off in 2nd range, 1st gear then flick a switch to go 2:1, 2:2, 2:3, 2:4, then clutch, shift the gear stick to 3rd range, flick the switch back to first gear, 3:1, 3:2, 3:3, 3:4 etc. That gets old very quickly (but at least you're not having to clutch for every gear change, just one in four). The next level up is a gearbox that also does the range changes, some will do that by themselves and some you have to ask them but either way you don't have to use the clutch. I have only driven two tractors with them (I'm not a tractor driver) but I haven't got on well. The first was a bigger McCormick and you had to tell it when to change. You'd flick the "change up" button and each gear shift was quick and fairly smooth, then you'd get to the range change which was always a nasty surprise if you weren't paying attention. Flick the button, the power would just go, you'd sit there panicking for what seemed like an age then get jerked out of your seat as it finally managed to find a gear. The second was a brand new Massey 7616 so that's a mid sized 160hp tractor. You could control it manually or you could leave it to do its own thing. Pulling away on a field with a silage trailer it would decide that it wanted 3rd range, 1st gear, try to pull away, decide that was too high a gear, change down to 2nd range, 1st gear (by this time the harvester has overtaken you and covered the bonnet with silage instead of it going in the trailer). Obviously 2:1 was far to low a ratio so it would then frantically change up through all of that range and back up in to 3rd range which was now the correct range because we'd started moving. Once you got going it was perfect and on the road it was great which is why I kept putting it back in to automatic. I just kept forgetting to take it out of auto to initially pull away on the field. Thankfully Massey gear and ratio changes were a lot quicker and smoother than McCormick ones! The auto mode was great for some scenarios but rubbish in others. Then we have what all tractors should have because they're just so much better than anything else by a country mile, and that's the CVT/Vario/IVT/DynaVT/whatever name you give it. They generally use a planetary gearset with inputs from the engine and a variable hydraulic pump, in a similar way to how the Prius transmission works. Fendt were the first adopters but most major manufacturers now do them. I don't think you can get a Zetor CVT but you can get a Kubota with one. The Massey I was talking about earlier had 24 gear ratios, and you can get tractors with even more than that. The idea is that in field work you can always keep your engine as close to its optimum power band as possible, the cost being that inevitably you're always in the wrong gear, you either have to have lots of repetition of ratios to cover the range changes or weird gaps in the speeds you can work at because you don't really want to be sat at the top or bottom of a range because if you do need to change up or down whilst in the middle of some cultivations it's difficult. Move over to a CVT and you just don't have those issues and you can also do various other clever things with them. You can have manually controlled or automatically controlled CVTs, the older ones are more manual but they're still not exactly hard to use. Stick forwards and the box changes up, the further you push it the faster it adjusts. Let go of the stick and it returns to the middle. Nudge forwards: get a bit faster, nudge backwards: get a bit slower. To reverse you either pull the stick back and hold it there as the ratios change and it comes to a halt then return to middle and pull back and now you're going backwards. On ours, you can also pull the stick sideways towards you and it will then go in to automatic shuttle mode and will slow the tractor down with the gearbox as much as it can (set the RPM to 2,600 and then you put your foot on the engine brake, the gearbox holds the RPM at 2,600 and keeps adjusting to maximise braking). When it gets to 0 speed it will then start to accelerate backwards up to the pre-set backwards shuttle speed. Say we've got a bit of equipment on the back of one of our tractors, we can set the engine to be at its most efficient (or powerful or whatever) RPM and then dial in how much we will allow it to vary from that. Set in to the field then you can set the transmission to increase the speed (and therefore the load) until the engine is running at full whack. If you get to a harder bit then the transmission will back off and reduce the load, get to an easier bit and it will increase again. It's just nice to having to worry about the gears, means you can concentrate on other things. So, CVTs are much better, but what about the cost? Well going from a Massey with a powershift to a Fendt with a CVT you're looking at an increase of about 10-15% in initial purchase price, or at least that's how it is here. If you're in an area that shifts more Masseys and fewer Fendts it might be a bigger jump. That's not exactly comparing like for like, you're getting a lot more stuff in the Fendt. More spools, on board compressor, better computer etc. The benefits are a better tractor, a transmission that's much kinder on the whole power train (after all you're never jerking anything, it's all just smooth), an engine that will have a nicer life as it's just sat at its optimum working range for most of the time it's actually working hard, much better residual values and lower running costs. When we moved to Fendts decades ago, they were lasting twice as long as the tractors we were using before. Currently, if you look at the lifetime costs they still work out well because a properly set up CVT will generally use less fuel than a powershift. You pay for a tractor once, you fill it up every day. There are scenarios in which they don't make sense. For a yard tractor, for a tractor that isn't putting much power through the transmission, for tractors that aren't being used heavily etc. then you're probably better going for a cheaper one. You can also contrive situations where the slightly higher parasitic load of the CVT outweighs the benefit of always having the correct gear ratio, and if you've managed to get a constant load on the transmission that's magically at the optimum engine RPM in a gear then the simpler the transmission the better. But that never happens in the real world. Now obviously a bad CVT mated to a bad engine in a bad tractor will be worse than a decent powershift with a decent engine, and they do exist, but stick to a decent tractor and you'll do well. |
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21st Jul 2016 9:37am |
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