The production of high-quality basic ration from meadows, pastures and whole crop is the basis of every grassland farm. Ruminants are fussy about their forage. The quality of their basic ration will determine whether your animals consume the forage in high quantities, or not. In addition to energy content, odour and taste, a low crude ash content plays a decisive role.
They go for a basic ration that is clean and nutritious. The amount of concentrates used can be reduced. This cuts forage costs while at the same time improving animal health. The bottom line is that you benefit from clean, high quality forage with more profit from your farm business.
Yet producing the best forage is not done by coincidence. The foundation for this is laid by the botanical composition of the crop. The volume and quality yielded here must be maintained along the entire harvest chain.
If you harvest during the phase when the buds or panicles are forming, the crop has a dry matter content of around 20 %. In order for the crop to be stored properly, this must still be raised to a greater or lesser extent depending on the storage method.
For best storage stability, none of the forage should be wet. That is why the forage must be distributed evenly over the surface without forming heaps and, if necessary, turned over at least once. Depending on the rate of wilting, there is a greater or lesser risk of losing valuable organic nutrients through disintegration losses in the field. The drier the forage, the higher the risk. Forage conservation is therefore the be-all and end-all.
This is exactly what the tedders from PÖTTINGER stand for. The optimum rotor diameters and the sweeping tines on the proven DYNATECH rotors, in combination with matched rotor speeds, reduce the risk of disintegration losses to a minimum.
For clean and tidy spreading work, the tines must reach all the forage. This is the only way to ensure uniform drying of the crop. At the same time, dirt ingress needs to be avoided. This is because forage contamination has a doubly negative effect in terms of supplying nutrients to livestock:
Valuable nutrients in the forage are diluted
Lower forage intake by the livestock
Harvesting machines therefore need to work as close to the ground as possible without scraping. If the field is not level, special attention must be paid to ground tracking of the machinery.
Precision ground tracking by the jockey wheels, floating frame sections and the unique swept shape of the rotor tines guarantee that HIT tedders deliver minimum dirt ingress and a uniform spread pattern.
"As a supplier of high-quality hay to horse stables, forage quality is of great importance to us. Because the material needs to be as dust-free as possible, the ground tracking of the machinery has to be excellent. Following very positive experience with the MULTITAST jockey wheel system on the TOP 762 C centre-swath rake, we also chose PÖTTINGER for the tedder. The ground tracking is awesome thanks to the jockey wheel out in front and the rotors being mounted on individual frame sections. We also use another tedder, but the difference between that and the neat spread pattern of the HIT is immediately recognisable. With the small rotors and swept tine arms, the HIT 8.81 has a super spread pattern and no material gets snagged on the tine arms. It folds very compactly and can be operated by our 80 Hp tractor even without front ballast. Thanks to the hydraulic headland lifting system, there is always sufficient ground clearance."
Sven Erlemayer, farmer, Ennepetal | Germany