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Benefits of laying down a wide swath of alfalfa
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Gerard
Posted 6/30/2006 22:44 (#23194 - in reply to #23074)
Subject: Re: Benefits of laying down a wide swath of alfalfa



Woodham, Ontario
Nice timing with this thread, I just got back from cutting 170 acres of alfalfa for silage.

That website has been one of the many things I read to decide to try wider swaths. I'm nowehere near 80%, but now I can use our 15'7" discbine again and get bettter quality feed. Currently the swaths I make are about 7'-7.5' wide. So about 50%. For first cut I tried a couple things, I tried opening the rolls to not condition for a couple swaths and I also tried driving over the swaths. Neither one worked very well. In this part of Ontario we need to condition our alfalfa, i don't think it is possible to make dry enough haylage in a couple hours. We have the same inverter used in the study, and H&S hydraswing with 9' pickup. You really do need the 9' pickup to always get the 7.5' swaths. When you drive over the swaths the inverter has a hard time picking it up, even at the lowest setting. During first cut the wider swaths dried a lot better and made a much better feed. That part is true. Not conditioning and driving over swaths does not work for US HERE. Makeing haylage in a day is impossible anyway if you have 200+ acres to cut.

You have to evaluate and try out the results of these studies for yourself and adopt what works and forget what doesn't work. We were considering trading the New Holland 1441 discbine for a smaller mower because the swaths dried too slow but now that we have gone to wider swaths and a larger tractor we have the large capacity of the 15'7" mower and high quality feed. Now we can cut over 250 acres a day and harvest it the next day. The larger mower also means fewer swaths to merge and the wide pickup of the H&S merger allows us to keep them wide.

To go to wider swaths we'd have to go to a combination of a frount mounted mower and a rear mounted mower which costs a lot more and creates more swaths to merge. Right now merging takes a long time. For now we are very happy with how things are working and we will continue the way we are working now.

Edited by Gerard 6/30/2006 22:47




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