Dry land and sunny weather, so far the harvesting circumstances have been optimal for the farmers and the agricultural contractors they hire. After abundant rainfall, the harvest is often a muddy mess, with immense stress on the machinery and soil structure.
Last Saturday, contractor Van den Hurk was harvesting corn silage in our river forelands. The forage wagons, all hooked up to AWD Case IH farm tractors, were filled by a Claas Jaguar 930 self-propelled harvester.
An empty rig is in hot pursuit, all set and ready to get another fresh load. Note the covers on both sides of the wagons.
And up they are, driver operated while rolling down the land. Kaweco is a Dutch manufacturer of (self-loading) forage wagons and other agricultural equipment.
The Claas forage harvester is powered by an inline-six, 12.8 liter Mercedes-Benz OM 460 LA engine. How about that, a Jaguar powered by Benz.
The cows will love it!
Lurking far in the background, clearly the smallest and oldest wagon of the bunch.
Farming in the Netherlands always includes very frequent on-road driving. The loaded rig we saw further above has just left the river forelands and is crossing the dike, on its way to the farm in the hinterland.
And here’s another major advantage of dry land and sunny weather while harvesting: no layer of mud on the backroads.
The harvest is a continuous process of combinations coming and going. This one has returned from the farm and goes into the boonies again.
Full speed ahead! (while keeping an eye on pedestrians and all other road users, naturally).
A view from the other side, while walking on the bike path, later on. The tractor is an Austrian built Case IH CVX 195, powered by a Finnish Sisu engine (6.6 liter displacement, turbocharged and intercooled). This model was offered from 2007 to 2012.
New Holland, Case IH and Steyr (and there’s the Austrian connection) are all brands of CNH Industrial.
Approaching a short yet rather steep incline, so crossing the dike from hinterland to river forelands.
In any Case, at some point you have to go around a roundabout. Good job, guys!
Related article:
Cohort Outtake: Claas Columbus Combine – In Praise Of The Combine, The Ultimate Mechanical Monster
Nice! Harvest is just getting started here in Central IL. It will be a prolonged one as the very wet Spring meant late or no plantings for a lot of farmers.
Yup got to keep that harvester moving, so a steady stream of empty wagons is important.
It is interesting that they continue to market the CASE/IH and NewHolland brands in the traditional IH Red and Ford Blue in various parts of Europe. But then I guess there are people in Europe who agree “Real Tractors are Red”.
These days, one has to wonder what a New Holland tractor sets apart from a Case IH and/or a Steyr. As far as I know, they all use the same FPT hardware, at least here in Europe.
The same can be said of course about the AGCO brands Fendt, Valtra and MF.
Not unlike the fact that there wasn’t much difference between an Olds, or a Buick once they went to corporate engines.
However I think tractor buyers are very brand loyal so which one do you drop and potentially see their buyers go Green. When I was driving through rural Spain I noted that they had a New Holland Dealer and a Case/IH dealer side by side in the same/connected building. And the front line was exclusively Blue in the front on one side and Red on the other. I’m guessing it was really a combined operation but the signage/doors to the showrooms. The only reason I can see doing that is that brand/color loyalty.
I’ve seen a number of Claas forage harvesters being used in Vermont where our summer place is, they must have a dealer in the area. Of course John Deere dominates the tractor market there, he was born in Rutland Vermont after all! Although the dairy farmers in our family there always were on the red tractor team, I have a pic from the early 50s showing me watching my Great Uncle Arthur pitching loose hay onto a hay wagon being pulled by a Farmall A.
Now you really got me homesick-“chopping silage” was about the best part of harvesting, as the weather was usually really nice and the task required a good number of people working together, unloading the wagons and keeping them moving so the chopper could continue to work. The one time of year teenage boys would rush to get their after-school chores finished, so they could go over and help with the hauling. Those Claas forage harvesters are really large and powerful, much bigger than the two row machines we had. And we thought we were big stuff. The wagons have covers for them, as the silage at this point is pretty loose and would blow off the tops of the wagons if left uncovered.
The cattle will indeed love it. Corn silage ferments when kept in oxygen-free storage, into a sour smelling (to us humans), rough-looking concoction that is much more easily digested than raw cornstalks, leaves and grain.
Were they unloading into upright silos, or dumping the silage into pits? We used pit silos, and the pile would get pretty high and exciting to drive over before we were done.
No upright silos here for forage/silage. Everything into these, mostly full concrete. Dutch name: sleufsilo.
Very clean! Exactly like what we had, though we didn’t bother with the plastic covering (it would shred and tear off and blow away in the Iowa wind, only to get tangled up in the fences. It was referred to locally as “neighbor paper.”) I remember helping to pour the concrete for the side of ours and lifting the slabs into place.
Now, imagine one of these filled to one-and-one-half times the height of the sides, with a long slope down to the front, roughly parallel to those angles in the front edges of the sides. (Kind of like a very tall loaf of bread with a flat tail in front.) When filled, the stack would be that high. Which meant, in order to unload, you would drive up onto the top of the stack from the other end, stop at the top, open the big back door of the wagon (we used regular barge wagons with a lot of side boards), raise the wagon, buck the silage off, and then run the tractor and wagon all the way down the front. Whee!!
The covering is secured by tires, sand(bags) or straps. A more modern system looks like this:
Are there many Asian tractors used in the Netherlands or elsewhere in Europe? Kubota is very popular here and moving up the chain in size; also, though less prevalent here, Mahindra.
Asian tractors are used by the fruit growers and horticulturists, which means you only see the Japanese “compacts” around here.
Anything bigger is Euro or American. New Holland, Case IH, John Deere, Fendt, Deutz-Fahr and MF are the most common brands in the Netherlands.
Note:
CNH Industrial: New Holland, Case IH, Steyr.
AGCO: Fendt, MF and Valtra.
I see the occasional piece of Claas equipment here in the American midwest (central Indiana) but as in RAnderson’s area, John Deere Green is the primary color.
My BIL grows popcorn and long ago went to semi trailers for grain hauling after using old-school grain trucks like those his father had used. The graduated from old single-axle GMCs to a tandem axle International and finally to semis.
“In any Case”… ha, ha… good pun there. But the picture of the tractor navigating a traffic circle is definitely unusual from an American perspective. Even in agriculture-intensive areas, it’s unusual to see farm equipment in town.
We use those Claas forage harvesters but trucks and trailers with silage bins or silage tops on regular tipping bins as the silage pits can be over an hours travel from the harvest field by truck so 25 tonne loads are more practical, waste from vegetable processing factories is also trucked out to farms as cattle feed and pomice from apple juicing plants having a truck licence gets you amongst all this where I live doing seasonal jobs, now I’m carting milk and dairy factory by products like lactose cream and buttermilk.