Krone Mower Conditioner Demo

[Music] hi welcome to virtual farm science review we're out here doing hey demos today my name is christine galle from osu extension and i'm brent rains from the crone company from olive branch mississippi together brett and i are going to talk about some educational components of making hay and first things first we're going to talk about cutting height cutting height is very important both for good quality forage and maintaining your equipment brett you've brought along a few different knives as well as an example to show us how to angle the cutter bar for best results i have christine this is a profile of our of a cutter bar a typical design of a of a cutter bar that's used in the industry today and you'll notice it's kind of a wedge type profile ideally you want to run that cutter bar through the field as level as possible you don't want to run it down on the nose you don't want to run it back on the heel because what that's going to do is it's going to increase your horsepower requirement you want to move that crop across the the cutting disc and out the back of the machine or into the conditioning medium as smoothly as possible if we're talking about stubble height you know most universities including the ohio state university recommend a stubble height of approximately three inches and that's a really good place to start the way that we do that is you can do a little bit of adjustment with your with your cutter bar adjustment on your machine but you want to use what's called a high cut skid and what that skid does is it clips on the front of your of your mower conditioner and it bolts through the back and that will raise your cutter bar for approximately one to three inches to give you that three to five cutting height that you want to do one thing that's you may have to go with us with a higher cut skid shoe if you're doing a sorghum sudan or a sorghum type crop especially where nitrate is going to be a concern that's migrating up into the stalk due to the weather conditions so the cutting the cutting skid and the skid shoe will allow you to still run your cutter bar at a smooth level profile through the feed indeed it will and that's going to benefit plant health overall you'll have better stand regrowth if your cutting height is appropriate a denser stand and less weed competition as well now another important thing is having good sharp knives on your cutter bar right you brought up some different kinds i did i did i brought a cutting knife off of a machine that was actually running and you can see the guy had some issues with streaking and he was complaining about the quality of the cut and you can see right here christine by just comparing these two what uh what the difference was yeah i wonder i wonder why it wouldn't cut huh so one thing that we have uh here in the great lakes states especially here in ohio is we have a very diverse mix of geography and like where we're mowing here near london ohio today it's flat as can be we go about 60 miles east of here and we start getting into the hill country and things are a little bit serious some a lot of reclaimed coal mine ground over in eastern ohio down along the along the river and we have customers that have more challenging uh conditions so they're concerned they have a lot of stones or maybe you mentioned some some where the creek came up and there may be some debris that came up and the creek went back down we have two blade options that are available we have a regular updraft blade which has a tapered angle to it that is reversible and that will allow you that gives you some lift that gives you almost like a big vacuum going through your field the thing that that may do depending on your crop is um ash content is going to be a big thing that christine and i are going to talk about here in just a minute but you know maybe if you're worried about ash content and or stones you have more more challenging conditioning you may want to go with what we call a roof shaped blade this blade is inherently stronger you'll notice the top of the blade is flat and then the edges come down so we don't get as much lift with that we won't get as pretty a cut with this as we will with the updrafts lawnmower style blade as you will but uh it it will take some of the the banging and bruising that sometimes the stones and the rougher conditions bring up don't certainly make uh you change knives less frequently you change knives less frequently that's right and i've been watching you guys do hey demos all morning you do have a quick change knife system which is convenient that's right and that will allow you to change the blade when you should not when you have to when we just strictly stick in a tool that kind of looks like a golf club and we stick it in underneath the cutting turtle pry down slip the new knife in and you're back in business so it's done when it should be done instead of when i absolutely positively have to do it so it makes for a much better quality cut and better better definitely better regrowth healthier stand the cleaner your cut is the easier it's going to be for your plants to grow back and the cleaner the cut is the less likely you'll have entry of pathogens we're near columbus ohio right now the farther east you get the narrower the roads get and the more challenges that we face with our fellow road users that we have to share the highway with we're going to show you how simple it is to go from mowing to transport on a side pole chrome mower conditioner so aidan let's just put it in he doesn't have to get in he doesn't have to get out of the cab just that easy so we move it that way and then on the ends we have the ability to fold that up to make it even narrower so show the road use your part of it but be safe and be smart let's talk about conditioning options we have it depends on your crop it depends on your your environment what kind of what kind of weather challenges that you have maybe the farther north you live you may have shorter days higher humidities all kinds of variables will will be involved with determining what kind of conditioning the first option you have of course is no conditioning whatsoever just lay it down let mother nature do it you know let the sun let it do its thing the crop will respirate down into the 40s you know before it starts to uh to protect itself and and and slow down and stop so um the other option we have is the v-tine uh a lot of customers uh have grass-based crops and uh you know there's more and more genetic research being done with uh grass forages than there are with cereals and so there's more and more interest in grass so we have the v-tine conditioner which is a metal v that picks the crop up off the cutter bar it's not a flail because if it was a flail conditioner you would not need a cutter bar because that flail would do the mowing so you're going to take the crop off the cutter bar it works like a concave in a cylinder on a combine you're going to pick that crop up off the cutter bar up above it there's what we call a bruising shield or a conditioning hood and the distance that you go between your v-tine and the conditioning hood plus the speed will determine the aggressiveness and the amount of conditioning that that you want to want to have on your crop whatever conditioning you decide to go with the most important adjustment is the adjustment of the guy that's holding the steering wheel the operator the machine is no better than of anybody's any manufacturer's machine is no better than the guy that's that's operating the machine now let's talk about rolls we have two different options we have rubber rolls inner meshing chevron type if you have a lot of stones you have some maybe the maybe the the rubber roll is the way to go for you uh they're a little more forgiving when you get into some more challenging conditions also if you're looking at if you're 100 alfalfa or you know you're concerned about leaf loss you know maybe the roll conditioner is the way to go the thing that you want to make sure that you do is check the roll gap make sure that your conditioners are in good shape and that you're getting even pressure because first crop is going to have a crop mat maybe like this third or fourth crop the map may be like this so we're going to have to make some adjustments don't just get in the in the miller conditioner and just go you know you're going to have to think and make some adjustments to match the crop and the volume of material that you're putting through it so our third option is the m roll that we have from chrome and what that does is it's a steel on steel roll we have a lot of guys that are doing challenging crops maybe it's a hollow stem that you need to fracture the stem and then or just high volume crops like proton that they do out west we see a lot of people using cereal rye's uh in cover crop applications here in ohio and in the great lakes states and then they're instead of disking those down and rolling them down uh and planting through the they're taking it off and using it as a as an alternative forage the other thing is a crop like sorghum sudan silo milo you may call it proton whatever the brand name is it's with it it has a thick stem that's got a lot of moisture in it and you know stem moisture and humidity that's one thing that's the the leaves and the stems may be dry but but you know the root of that plant the base of it may still hold a hold a lot of moisture so you may need something like the like the m roll uh to be a little more uh a little more aggressive so just depends lots of ways to go lots of sizes to go six foot six up to 38 with our brand of machinery so you know make sure that you size your mower uh appropriately with the horsepower that you have so that it's a safe platform and it's a stable platform so that you know you can get as much productivity out of a safe day as possible thanks let's talk about tires you know when you when you're making it when you're making a tractor purchasing decision tires are part of the conversation and it should be part of the conversation when you're talking about a mower conditioner you want to talk about your environment where you're going to mow the time of year that you're going to mow you know we have customers that sometimes their their first cut may be the ground may be very heavy uh you know really wet so you know you want to make sure that you have a floatation tire an agricultural tire like we have here that's designed for flotation the other thing is you want to make sure that you have enough ply in the tire to match the speed requirement this isn't the kind of tire profile this tire is designed to float through a farm field it's not designed to go down the interstate like a truck tire so you want something that is going to have both strength from a ply rating and also flotation because the floatation is in the sidewall of that tire and you the other thing is it's going to be a important part of how if you're in the hillside it's going to make a a big important contribution to how well that it stays on the hillside so tires don't don't forget them and you know they're also designed for today's high-speed tractors tractors today going 30 33 higher on the on the highway so you know most ag tires weren't designed you know to go long distances or down the highway so entire important tire decisions are important brent disc bowers have certainly allowed us to mow faster but they also allow us to cover up some bad habits they'll know with dull blades that's right they'll they'll let you mow when you shouldn't you can mow in the rain uh you know and uh some guys when they go to the field to mow they want to see how fast they can go and you talked about cut quality and you know what you're trying to do is you're when you cut that crop you're doing it for the health of the crop you're doing it for the crop well-being and you know if you do it at a proper speed at a safe speed for your tractor so that in the event that a a deer or a dog or you know groundhog anything uh rockstick sooner or later you're going to find something that shouldn't be in that hay field that supposed yeah and you are not going to want to be going at a speed that doesn't give you the ability to a react and be stopped without causing damage to you the machine the tractor whatever you're gonna hit you know so you wanna you want to be able to make sure that your tractor is sized appropriately so you have enough horsepower and that it's also a stable uh solid work when you're moving so maximum speed does not equal maximum productivity the faster you go the more likely you are to get yourself into some sticky situations [Music] so brent sometimes people take home a piece of equipment and it works good for a little while and then problems start to pop up and we've got to troubleshoot these issues when folks call me for assistance with these issues what are the things i should tell them to check first well a couple of the things that you could ask and talk about is their ground speech are they going too fast are they not going fast enough you know do you you want that crop to just move over like a wave move over the over the cutter bar and move back and forth are their blades dull like that first blade we looked at you know it's like this long well no wonder they're not getting a good cut so you those are the the two things uh another thing is make sure that all the proper crop guidance uh shield or the directional design components that were put into the machine that they're still in place that somebody hasn't taken one out because they thought maybe this would work better or that wouldn't work better most of the time we find when we go back to what we would call a factory default setting things will work good but you know one thing we need to talk about christine is hayfield housekeeping and you know we see i was up in north dakota a couple weeks ago and those are guys that were bailing hay along the interstate highways can you imagine us trying to do that here on i-70 in ohio we have some people in my area bail along 77. oh my goodness all the garbage all the garbage all the crud that goes in with it that's bad for your equipment it's bad for your livestock that's right that's right you don't want that in the feed bunk but the the thing that you need to make sure that you watch is tuan twine is a nemesis big bale twine a lot of twines now have gone from the old sisseltwine or you know the old natural hemp twine uh to poly and it doesn't break down and you'll see it wound around the manure spreader beaters if it'll wound wind around a manure spreader beater it will wind around your cutting disc on your mower what's the danger of that besides it just doesn't work as well well it just doesn't work as well but it i've actually seen situations where it will get in there and it'll get so hot that it'll catch fire and you know so you don't you don't need that some of the uh high tensile wires that a lot of guys are utilizing the thinner wire that they're using for temporary fencing same situation so high tensile fence wire portable fence wire um bale twine things like that if you see it in the field take a second to get off the tractor and pick it up because you don't want bossy eating it and you sure don't want to run it through your mower because that's going to tear it apart and if it was this big before it went through the mower when it goes through it's going to be this big and you're going to be picking up quite the best exactly and that's going to cost you a lot of money and a lot of time a lot of aggravation right well brett we've had a fun morning here we have you're watching aiden motion for us that's right we're gonna be back again with another video to do some tetting some reiki and we'll do some veiling tomorrow so enjoy virtual farm science review and come back and see us again in a little bit see you after a while [Music] [Music] you

Channel: OSU Agronomic Crops

Views: 1,178

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: Gpkn0aqURts

Length: 18min 54sec (1134 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020