One last grass cut before the winter season sets in, featuring a Fendt 415 Vario with a front mower and a Schuitemaker self-loading silage wagon. Just think of mowing your lawn, yet on a much larger scale.
The 4WD Fendt 415 Vario, offered from 2007 to 2013, is a perfect all-rounder for dairy farmers. Compact, efficient and capable.
It’s powered by an inline-four 4.0 liter Deutz engine. Turbocharged, inter- and water cooled.
Fendt is a pioneer in the field -quite literally- of stepless transmissions for big farm tractors, their revolutionary Vario transmission was first offered in 1996.
Use a silage wagon, or wrap it up. The dots in the landscape are silage bales, wrapped in plastic.
The wrapping process fully explained.
The bales are transported on a flatbed trailer. The Deutz-Fahr tractor is equipped with a (detachable) Quicke front loader and a clamp to load~unload the bales.
The same rig, another load, another point of view. It speaks for itself that a Deutz-Fahr tractor is powered by a Deutz engine.
All done for this year…
…but wait, get a load of these! A duo of Volvo articulated dump trucks.
Johannes:
You live in one of the most, if not the most, resourceful countries in the world. Would you care to write an article regarding the measures that the Netherlands is employing to deal with the rising sea level? I am certain that the efforts being made would be very instructive.
Zipster, although I’ve been living right inbetween two major rivers my whole life, water management is way beyond my comfort zone 😉
But it’s a very crucial and interesting topic for sure. You can have a look here, the website of our national Rijkswaterstaat authorities, in English:
https://www.rijkswaterstaat.nl/english/water/water-safety/sea-level-rise/index.aspx
Thank you, this appears to be quite comprehensive.
Speaking of water, many farmers in the midwest are just now harvesting their grain. Apparently, they had to wait for the ground to freeze in many areas before they could bring in their equipment.
In the past, I have helped a buddy of mine to bale hay with a front end baler with a plastic type wrap. I got pretty good at it. At least the cows didn’t complain come winter time.
However, my bales never looked as good as the silage bales above. 👨🌾👨🌾🚜🚜
Probably the very first cash paying job I had was working on a hay baling crew when I was 13 or so. This was more than 50 years ago and long before the days when huge rolls were wrapped via machine and then picked up by some other machine. Instead, the baler spit out rectangular shaped bales that were then hoisted up onto a trailer by sweating teenagers where more sweating teenagers stacked the bales as neatly as possible so the bales wouldn’t fall off while being transported to the barn. When the trailer was full it was pulled into the barn where sweating teenagers stored the bales where required. As best I can remember these bales weighed 75-80 pounds so lifting and then tossing them was a good way to develop upper body strength. Also, no matter how hot the day one learned to wear long sleeved shirts or suffer the consequences of scratched forearms.
I was one of those sweating teenagers. Farm boys always had work. Coaches sent their town boys to various farms. I guess the idea was the work would build off season strength. Between small breaks in the soreness, you could almost feel your muscles grow.
Probably nothing more than an old wive’s tale but the received wisdom when I was growing up was that it was much better for you to develop muscles doing actual work as opposed to just lifting weights. I doubt if your body actually knows the difference if the weight you are lifting is hay bales or iron plates. No doubt we were told this to make us more accepting of performing hard, physical labor for little money.
Other end of the hay and silage season round here its just getting started big dairying area where I’m based, roads are alive with milk tankers all night and lots of farm machinery moving about during the day as contractors move from place to place, they seem to use trucks more in the cartage tractor drawn trailers have serious disadvantages once you move off farm
Farm tractors + trailers are only used for short distances, from the pasture directly to the farm. The rest, including international transport of course, is truck + trailer or tractor unit + semi-trailer.
How does the grass cutter cut the grass and transport it to the wagon? When I was a teen, Dad had a pull-type flail chopper (lots of knives mounted vertically on a horizontal shaft inside a sheet metal housing-you treated that machine with a lot of respect) that would blow the chopped hay back into an unloading wagon.
This would then sit overnight to partially ferment, so that it would produce less gas in the stomaches of the cows when they chowed it down the next day. Much easier than baling the hay, and you could store the excess as haylage in the pit silo for later consumption. But those of us who baled square hay cherish our memories, if only as something to harangue the grandkids with (along with having to walk uphill five miles both ways in the snow to get to school) when they complain about having to take out the trash. Thanks for the view from your side of the pond!
The grass cutter only cuts the grass, the (self-loading) silage wagon picks it up.
My mother’s Uncle Gerhard had a dairy farm in Minnesota. I remember visiting them as a kid and riding along with Aunt Clara to take lunches to the guys who were out bailing hay. I was amazed at how high they could stack those bales on the wagon. It looked like they were having fun but I now know that it would have been fun for maybe the first five minutes.
It is amazing to see how mechanized the process has become.
Although I occasionally see the cylindrical bales sitting in fields in the western US, perhaps for on-farm use(? I’m a city boy) it’s far more common to see rectangular bales and that’s pretty much all I see being hauled on the road, whether in huge semi-truck hay haulers or precariously piled in the backs of pickups. Are the rectangular bales used in Europe at all, or is that a North American thing? FYI hay haulers out West are some of the last remaining cabover semi’s in use here; I guess hay is pretty low density so the COE tractor maximizes the load volume for a given weight limit.
By the way, in a variation of the CC Effect, the HB (Hay Bale) Effect is in action here, as just yesterday before I read this post, I used hay bales for the first time ever, in the volunteer trail building I do. They were supplied by the County Park crew, secured in blue twine not bailing wire, and the hay (straw?) was used for renaturalizing/mulching over disturbed soil by the trail side. Normally we use natural vegetation gathered on site, but the hay was actually very effective. FYI it was dropped along the trail by a 4WD Kawasaki Mule. Sorry, no pictures.
Rectangular bales are also common here.
Good eye on the baling twine. The wire bales were very old school, as they had to be tied by hand-some old farming pictures show two men sitting on little stools next to the baler, tying the wire bales as they came up the back chute. In hay lofts you may still find some rusty old wire-tied bales, way in the bottom in the back. We used sisal twine, which was preserved with some sort of stuff that smelled pretty strong and will probably give me cancer some day. I think some “square” bales are still tied with twine; some plastic.
Interesting! What surprised me is how green the grass and even the trees still are. I assumed (without much actual knowledge) that the Netherlands being up there in northern Europe would be colder and well into late autumn by early November.
An oceanic climate does the trick. We’re not northern enough to have Scandinavian (like in Norway and Sweden) winter-weather conditions. Generally, winters are mild and short.
I must add that it’s not a yearly routine for dairy farmers to cut grass in early November, but it does happen now and then.