Making Hay with Horses part 3
Making Hay with Horses part 3
by Paul Schmit of Luxembourg
Not Mature Enough!
In August 2001 my wife Cathy and I visited the late Charlie Pinney in Scotland. Grown up and having run a horse farm in southern England, Charlie moved later to the north of the United Kingdom where he farmed for some years with his second wife, Ella. It asked for some perseverance to arrive at their home, named Animal Swordle Farm, as it was located far away from every sign of civilization and only a small path guided you to the farmstead. Situated in one of the most beautiful landscapes I have ever seen in whole Europe, the Scottish Highlands, it could easily be the motif of a postcard. Just a five minutes’ walk away from the rough west coast of Scotland facing the Atlantic, it was surrounded by nothing else than sheep and even herds of red deer grazing on the impressive green mountains.
Maybe I was not mature enough at that time, simply too naive in my plans for developing horse farming, as I didn’t really understand why Charlie and his family thought about leaving this beautiful place again. Perhaps I was also too spoiled by the climatic conditions on continental Europe, offering always good conditions for harvesting nearly every crop. At that time the climate change wasn’t yet in the headlines, but Ella and Charlie considered it as impossible to continue farming in Argyll. Due to the rainy weather in this region, making hay became quite a thing of impossibility and also the straw had to be bought and brought over from far away. Older farmers bore out that these were not just some years of bad luck, but that the raising humidity in atmospheric conditions was a trend which could be traced back over decades. There surely may also have been some other, private reasons for moving down to Wales, where Charlie spent the last years of his life, as a horse farmer of course. Living in a restful seclusion might be perfect for a holiday, but is a true challenge during the whole year, especially in the depths of winter, where it took days for the electricity supply company to arrive at this out-of-the-way area in order to reinstall the power lines after a storm hit the country.
Today I can reenact more and more the reasons which forced Charlie’s family to over think their farming approach as the change in climate gets also perceptible in Luxembourg. Charlie Pinney was surely one of the leaders, if not the most important person in Europe for everything which concerned farming with animal power. One of the best articles I have ever read about modern horse farming is the one which he published in 2002 in the British magazine “Heavy Horse World.” As the “unexpected question” the editor Mrs. Diana Zeuner introduced this essay, titled “A machine too many,” wherein Charlie asked with his own British humor and irony, but also with some self-critics, if the way of using forecarts in combination with modern tractor machinery is still, after all the experiences he made, the right decision.1 A question which he raised a second time in an article translated into German and published in 2004 in the magazine “Starke Pferde”.2
Point the Way Ahead…
In the picture above, Charlie Pinney is using a Pintow Powercart, the predecessor of the Triple System, which was presented at the Horse Progress Days 2005 in Lebanon (PA), coupled to the small M50 round baler manufactured by Abbriata in Italy. This forecart offered the possibility to power the pto by ground drive only, or by firing up a V2 Kohler gasoline engine of 25 hp. The small round bales of haylage were later packed into plastic by a small wrapper built by Zambelli of Italy, powered by the hydraulics of a stationary tractor.
Some years later, after developing with his companion Don Townsend the Triple System, Charlie left completely the path of using ground drive forecarts, as too ineffective, a decision which I can fully fathom. The decision for building engine powered forecarts was for the Pintow Company also an economic one. Building forecarts with small donkey engines to be used in combination with modern farm machinery for tractors was considered as the only way to build, and finally also sell, an adequate number of implements. Except for brewery show hitches, big hitches of four or more draft horses are quite a rarity in Europe, where most of the “hobby” farmers own only one or two equines.
Somehow, the aforementioned article of Charlie Pinney, however, also set the points as Charlie and I moved further on different tracks. I felt, and still feel, more of a rapport with pure animal power on our farm. I recently came back by train from a journey in Germany where I visited a company specialized in sickle bar mowers for tractors, where I hoped to find some parts for one of my next projects, the horse drawn mower. While the train made a stop at the railway station in Strasbourg on the French border to Germany, I looked at the busy people running on the platforms to catch their trains and found some similarities with some of my own problems.
Aren’t we, the farmers relying on animal traction, actually not like people looking for the right train, that can get us into the future?
I think yes, maybe there exists more than one train, that could be the right one. However, we have to keep always in mind that the criterions are not only technical questions. It’s not only a search for the right gear ratios or a maximum of efficiency. It’s also a question about credibility. In Europe environmental protection and sustainability are main themes in political discussions and I believe will surely become the main topic for everybody in the near future. If so called “horse farmers” are using equipment which looks, smells and is as noisy as tractors, not to speak about soil compaction or using up of natural reserves by burning fuels, it’s hard to find valid arguments for this undertaking.
Beating Mother Nature?
In order to harvest enough crop of good quality during the year, it’s often talked about beating Mother Nature. This approach to life is doomed to failure, as mankind can only subdue, or at best adapt itself to the rules of nature. As mentioned already in the first part of this series published in SFJ 2008 Winter issue, making hay is nothing too complex for most of the farmers around us. They simply don’t do it anymore. The crop is harvested in form of haylage by wrapping it, just one or two days after being mown, into stretched plastic film and conserving it by the fermentation which takes places in this anaerobic environment.
Considering the fact that the polyethylene film used is a plastic, which is manufactured on the basis of petroleum, natural gas or hard coal, thus nonrenewable fossil hydrocarbons, and keeping in mind that recycling of these synthetic materials is a problem which is only solved at the beginnings, this seems to be the wrong track. It would be too simple to hold only the townies or industrialists responsible for the global problems. Our modern society includes also the farmers.
If you can’t change nature, nor want to follow the line of approach of modern farming, you just have one issue: search for alternatives. The time needed for getting hay dry enough for baling is not only a question of weather conditions or structure of plants, it’s primarily also a question of using the right technology at the right moment. With all the experiences we made during the last years with different implements, I hope to have developed finally a strategy for making hay in the shortest time, which means at least four sunny days in our part of the world. Those who read these articles to the last detail will surely find some divergence to what was written here some time ago.
After the grass is cut in the morning, it will be tedded, two times during the first day, with our Pequea 910G fluffer, whose working principle I praised yet in the first part of this series. This allows creating a fluffy mat on the whole field and exposing the maximum surface to the sun rays. This procedure will be repeated during the second day. For the following operations it has to be kept in mind that the moisture in the drying matter is a relative value. This means that the plants not only transfer their dampness into the air, but can also assimilate it if the humidity in the air is too high. This tendency rises with the progressing drying of the crop. Therefore the crop is raked into windrows in the evening, after being ted only one time during the third day. The windrows are spread anew the following morning as soon as the sun has heated up the atmosphere enough. Raking the crop into swaths, facing inward to the field center, also increases its distance from the surrounding fences and hedges, thus reducing the loss of crop.
The main problem with the reel type Pequea fluffer is, however, that it can’t spread a swath of hay. Therefore I thought a long time about adapting one of the rotary type tedders for use by horses without the need of a ground drive forecart, thus by adapting the transmission system directly on the implement. There exist some nice two star pull type tedders in Europe, which seem to be predestinated for horse drawn use by their low weight of just 160 to 180 kg (~ 352 – 396 lbs.) and offering with six arms on each star a modest working width of about 2.60 to 3.10 m (~ 8½ – 10’). However, I concluded that the torque supplied by the traction wheels has to pass through too many gear or chain drives in order to redirect the rotation of the shafts and to get finally the right speed on the tines. Furthermore, this kind of implement tends to block, as our experiences with a ground drive forecart has taught us. This is not a problem if tractor power is used as the pto, even a low hp tractor supplies always enough torque to turn the tines and get the heaviest crop through the narrow pass between the stars.
Beside these disadvantages, you have also to keep in mind that spreading a windrow with a rotary tedder only works well if the implement is run with one star straight through the swath. If the swath is taken on the center of the tedder, there results a strip of crop which isn’t lifted off the ground by the tines, due to their forward inclination. The result is an uneven drying of the whole crop on the field as the wettest part of a windrow is always in the center and close to the ground. Using only a two star tedder, however, means that you have to drive with one wheel of the forecart and surely also with one horse, just over the windrow or simply offset the whole implement, which causes some side draft. None of these two methods was considered as real progress and the plans of a ground driven rotary tedder remained in cold storage.
A Jigsaw Puzzle
Building new implements is for me something like doing a jigsaw puzzle. First of all you need some patience and search often a long time to find the right piece to fit into the existing scheme. Sometimes you are also forced to try one or another wrong piece in order to find finally the right one. To find the right pieces for modifying our Pequea fluffer I made last February a trip by train to Verona in Italy, where the Fieragricola took place. This fair for agricultural machinery is the second biggest show behind the Eima in Bologna in the north of Italy. At the same time I took the opportunity to visit Albano Moscardo, who farms with horses in Verona. Albano is the speaker of a group called “noi e il cavallo,” which means “we and the horses” and recruits people interested in horse farming in Italy. There exist just a handful of people in Italy seriously involved in horse farming, but the equipment they have designed and built during the years is definitely the top of the line in Europe. Pictures of the Italian friends have been shown yet in SFJ3 and you will surely read more about these interesting people in a future issue of this magazine, as Albano and I agreed to collaborate on the project of a modern horse drawn mower.
My first idea was to combine the Pequea machine with two small belt driven side delivery rakes, one on each side. By this combination, it would be possible to drive the implement between two windrows and the half of each in front of the reel for aerating. Therefore, my first destination during the Fieragricola was the exhibition stand of the Molon Company. Besides some nice dump rakes, this company builds also a fine line of small side delivery rakes for use on motor mowers or walking tractors, a technology which is still very popular in the hilly northern part of Italy. The smallest model, called Molon Mini100, just weighs 80 kg (~ 176 lbs.) for a working width of 1.00 m (~ 3¼’), and has seven pairs of double tines driven by a single belt. However, during the discussion with Mr. Giovanni Molon, I discovered also some disadvantages of this kind of implement. These belt-type rakes rotate with about 250 rpm in order to assure that all the crop it moved to the side. It seemed not a good idea to me to first sweep the crop with such a high speed in front of the reel and to turn it afterwards gently with only 47 rpm (the reel speed). Furthermore as the discs turning the belt also need some transmission needing at least two pairs of bevel gears, also this piece of puzzle was put back on the pile.
The next visit during the fair was the stand of Tonutti, an Italian company which manufactures among others, a vast line of wheel rakes. When analyzing the exposed gigantic V-shape wheel rake, the penny finally dropped as I concluded that there finally exists no simpler way than combining the Pequea fluffer with two of these rake wheels.
I like to travel by train to cover great distances. It’s not only the most ecological way to travel, but it allows me also to read some good books or magazines in peace, something I rarely find the time at home. During the nearly ten hours journey back home from Verona, I also started to make some first drawings of the new implement. The waiter, walking the train up and down with his handcart full of snacks and drinks, didn’t pass any opportunity to have a quick look on my papers, which slowly but surely filled up the tray in my compartment. However, his facial expressions showed me that he classified the strange intersections of lines and circles I drew more as simple essays of an artist lead astray than something concrete.
As I was informed by Tonutti that they have no official dealer in Luxembourg, I did contact their German dealer. Mr. Severin Batzill isn’t an unknown person in the European draft horse circles as he supplied for the “PferdeStark 2005,” Europe’s Horse Progress Days held on a biennale rhythm in Detmold, a Tonutti Jumbo Raptor V10-2GW pull-type wheel rake with 10 wheels and a working width of 5.85 m (~ 19¼’), put into limelight by four Rhenish German draft horses hitched to a German Hisko forecart with hand operated hydraulics. When dialing the phone number of Mr. Batzill I wasn’t however quite sure who I would get on the phone. An international acting salesman, who makes his life by his capability to speak into three phones at the same time for selling goods around the world which he has never touched, or a person having both feet firmly on the ground and thus with some understanding for practical questions. The second was true as he took time to discuss my needs and we finally concluded that the new, so-called center kicker wheels, which are optional for the Tonutti Dominator and Millenium rakes, would fit best. These rakes are the biggest models of the Tonutti range and are manufactured up to 20 rake wheels on big hydraulically foldable frames with working width reaching 11.70 m (~ 38½’). In the center of the frame of these gigantic rakes can be mounted two additional smaller wheels, which have the duty to clean first the strip where the windrow is afterwards placed by the rake wheels. This assures that the crop at this area is lifted at least once off the ground for better drying and also improving the working quality of the following equipment.
Learning the Hard Way
After receiving the specs of the different rakes, I chose the C2 center kicker wheel kit of the Dominator series, which offered the best possibilities for being modified and incorporated into the Pequea machine. Modifying and incorporating meant designing and building a new frame which replaces the original tongue, and adapting a mechanism for lifting and setting the working width. In its original configuration the two center kicker wheels are lifted via two steel cables by a single acting hydraulic cylinder. The idea of the steel cables was maintained, the hydraulic cylinder, however took the place of a homemade lever, which is not only simpler and lighter than the hydraulic version, but also allows varying easily the ground pressure of the wheels, which is preset by two strong 6.0 mm (~ ¼”) coil springs.
The original steel rigid bars, which connected the rake wheel arms to the main frame of the Tonutti rakes and assured that the center kicker wheels fold up for road transport, were replaced by two telescoping locking bars. I once bought these two nice pieces in a shop for steel goods without having an immediate application, but simply for their rugged design with M20 (~3/4″) thread. After having spent now some years with similar parts in a dark corner of my stores, these parts re-emerged on the scene and seem to be predestinated for nothing else than this purpose.
Out of the initial kit there finally remained only the rake wheels running on roller bearings and their arms suspended in nylon bushings featuring grease zerks as well. All other parts of the assembly were homemade. As the rake wheels with their forty 7 mm (~ 9/32″) strong tines and 107 cm (~ 42 1/8″) outer diameter are quite light parts and the new frame being made out of hydraulically bent DN80 (~ 3″) and DN65 (~ 2½”) steel tubes having 4.05 mm (~ 5/32″) wall thickness, the total assembly adds only 117 kg (~ 258 lbs.) to the Pequea implement. The tongue weight on the hitch is about 52 kg (~ 110 lbs). Installing the new assembly in place of the standard tongue needs only to pull out three pins and to maneuver the whole assembly into the right position with our hand winch stacker. Therefore, the Pequea machine can easily be converted from a hay fluffer into a swath tedder. By the way, the original working principal can also be maintained by only lifting the rake wheels.
This year we were lucky enough to have two periods of four consecutive days of sunshine without rainfall, which allowed us to harvest good quality hay. However, if you have to wait till the middle end of July before making the first hay cut, it’s not only an exercise for your patience, but definitely also a strong challenge for every ground driven farm implement as the grass, even on a farm without any chemical fertilizer, grows into a hefty mass. Like last year it wasn’t worth it to do a second cut and we let the farm animals graze down the turf short enough for winter term. Just in one meadow the grass was standing high enough in the middle of September to justify a second cut, which made it possible to test the new implement. Speaking about a new implement is, however, a little bit exaggerated as the modification of the Pequea machine is in fact nothing more than gathering together two different still existing technologies, which, I think, fit well together.
It’s well known that the wheel-type rakes have their problems when working at low speeds in heavy crops with high moisture content. Therefore, I was a little bit anxious when hitching the implement the first time to the forecart and asking the horses to step forward. The field was prepared with different windrow shapes and widths in order to allow us to test various parameters. We even merged two windrows together. The first test took place on the second day after the grass was cut. As it was after a cold and damp night, it turned out very soon that the rake wheels couldn’t cope with such a heavy wet crop. Especially the left wheel, which runs in front, often blocked, even if increasing the ground pressure to its maximum. Also consulting the operator’s manual of Tonutti wasn’t of great help, as it stated only that the springs have to be set according to the speed, ground and crop conditions.4 Thus, learning by doing was the name of the game.
The rotation of the rake wheels is also a function of the angle to which they are laterally inclined. With a smaller inclination angle, the relative speed of the rake wheels matches better the velocity of the implement and let them turn better on the ground. Our goal was to set the wheels in such a way that the strip on which the swath was lying was raked clean. Cleaning the ground on which the hay laid during the night allows its drying during the day. The inclination of the rake wheels, however, influences also the way of feeding the crop into the reel for turning it.
To be honest, I have to admit that I didn’t really find during my test series the optimum in the relation between rake wheel angle and ground pressure to match the crop conditions. But I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t try it again next year and have the benefit of the winter time for developing some improvements. From a symmetric arrangement of the two rake wheels I expect fewer tendencies to block off the left front wheel. Double tines on the four tedder’s reel bars with increasing inclination to the side are some ideas for improving the spreading of the crop. I have no doubts that this principle works, but its field of application has surely to be searched in the second part of the hay drying process. The dryer the hay gets, the better this implement will work. A positive aspect is the fact that this covers well with my strategy for hay making explained above.
If this experiment is finally worth it to be another “small wagon” for our train into the future, this judgment I leave to the valued readership of the Small Farmer’s Journal.
Bibliography:
(1) A machine too many? Charlie Pinney in Heavy Horse World Spring issue 2002
(2) Zukunft der Pferdetechnik Charlie Pinney in Starke Pferde #31 Fall issue 2004
(3) Horsefarming in Italy , from the mail basket” Small Farmer’s Journal summer issue 2005
(4) Ranghinatore V10-12-14 Dominator Manuale dell’operatore Tonutti 2005