When harvesting ley you hope to get a fast drying and a faster harvest. If there is a
system with round bales, you need to have a dry matter close to 45 %. To make this as
fast as possible, there is made a machine which pick up the grass with an pick-up. It
turn the grass over and put it behind the machine (figure 2 and 4). There are few tests
to prove the efficiency of this machine. There are also no results about crop loses or
the butyric acid bacterium growth.
My study includes three methods of drying clover grass with an Elho TR220 (tedder).
One windrow is control there I didn’t do anything. With the second method I drove
the Elho machine after 18 h. The last method I drove the Elho twice, 18 h and 39 h
after cutting. Every treatment repeated 12 times. I registered the drying process before
any kind of treatment. After harvest I pick up the waste after the roto baler. The bale
who was made was marked so I could take tests for butyric acid later.
The result shows that there is no significant differences (5 % level) in DM between
the methods. There were no extra mechanical losses caused by the machine. The test
for butyric acid was varied. In the bale with grass who was treated with the Elho
machine once or twice, there were butyric acid in bales from one field.
My conclusions are:
The machine is good to use after some rain, because it turn up the grass so the roto
baler could pick the grass up better. I also think that the windrows will dry faster
when you tedding the windrow after a rain. This is not proved.
If you regulated the machine in the right way, you will not get any butyric acid
bacterium in the grass. (You should know that there is a risk, specially if the field
is uneven)
If you have a round baler you can drive once with the machine to get more even
DM-content in the windrow.
If you have a system with a precision chopper there is no point to use the Elho
machine because the precision chopper will mix the grass and even the DMconte...
