Best mower for 300ac of stewardship grass

Feldspar · Jan 31, 2020

Considering putting about 300ac into AB8 or AB15 stewardship grass. It requires topping to control black-grass and aid establishment in the case of AB15, and topping to keep grasses under control, smash up cuttings and allow flowers through in the case of AB8.

Not quite sure how big a mower I will need, but fairly sure our ageing 3m flail mower will not be enough. Was thinking something more like 5-6m. Main question is whether to get a bat-wing or a flail mower. I cannot have big tufts of grass left over. For AB15 you can cut regularly so won't dealing with huge new growths of grass and no fertiliser is used. For AB8 thought the summer cut is the only one and so there is a fair bit of material that needs mulching. Don't want to have to cut and collect as there is no real use of for this locally and it complicates the job.

Only other alternative is to find someone who wants 300ac of summer grazing for sheep who will eat all the cuttings!

Yale · Jan 31, 2020

Personally I’d say batwing like Spearhead as it’ll travel quicker however @DrDunc got on really well with a certain flail,maybe Kuhn which is just a beast of a machine.

Feldspar · Jan 31, 2020

Yale said:
Personally I’d say batwing like Spearhead as it’ll travel quicker however @DrDunc got on really well with a certain flail,maybe Kuhn which is just a beast of a machine.

Apologies if this is a stupid question, but how much do bat-wings shred the cuttings? I guess not much. Might it be a strategy, where it's allowed, to just mow an extra time or two so that you're cutting shorter lengths, or would it be better just to go through once with a flail? I assume a flail mower is also more expensive to maintain (and more power hungry)?

Ballpark, how much faster can you go with a batwing versus a flail?

cousinjack · Jan 31, 2020

I've heard great reports of those spearhead bat wings..... just as aggressive as a flail by all accounts and leave a better finish ..

Goweresque · Feb 1, 2020

Rotary will tend to leave lines of cut material in heavy going, whereas flails will leave an even spread. Conversely rotaries are better at cutting thinner material, as flails need the grass to have a decent bit of body to it to hold it against the flail. Thin grass with a flail tends to just get blown over and stand up again. If you have thinnish cover to cut I'd get as wide a rotary as possible.

milkloss · Feb 1, 2020

Rotary. They pick it up and thrash the living crap out of it and leave a good finish. A flail will leave tyre marks, need mucho horse power, slower, and don't have any lift much.

Sorbaer · Feb 1, 2020

Got a Speadhead 460 batwing topper here and 1000ac permanent pasture in higher tier stewardship and wouldn't be able to cope without it! Just looking at their website they do a 460 proline now which adds an extra 3 blades to the existing 3 to help with shredding if thats what you are worried about. Never had any problems here though and have cut bonnet high brambles with it before and has coped better than expected!

Feldspar · Feb 1, 2020

Nice! Batwings sound like the ticket. Good that they pick up the grass as that is a problem with our flail - leaves uncut black-grass and brome heads behind the tractor wheels. Don't have a front PTO so can't have one of those fancy setups where you get one mower on the front of the tractor and two to either side behind.

Do many second hand ones come up for sale? Asked about the price for a 6m one and it's about 18k which certainly isn't peanuts. Need to do some sums and see how the returns stack up against fallow which is what we're using at the moment.

If you could go say 6 kph with a flail, what sort of speed does that equate to on a rotary? Just thinking how many acres I could cover in a day. Maybe I could get away with a narrower one.

Feldspar · Feb 1, 2020

Goweresque said:
Rotary will tend to leave lines of cut material in heavy going, whereas flails will leave an even spread. Conversely rotaries are better at cutting thinner material, as flails need the grass to have a decent bit of body to it to hold it against the flail. Thin grass with a flail tends to just get blown over and stand up again. If you have thinnish cover to cut I'd get as wide a rotary as possible.

Why would you recommend getting as wide a rotary as possible? I mean the rep I spoke to today said you could get a 12m one, but I think that might slightly kill the profit in choosing this option!

Goweresque · Feb 1, 2020

Feldspar said:
Why would you recommend getting as wide a rotary as possible? I mean the rep I spoke to today said you could get a 12m one, but I think that might slightly kill the profit in choosing this option!

Just that its soul destroying sat on a topper for hours and hours making no progress. Especially if you have multiple passes to make over the growing season. And if the material is thin they you'll hardly be using any more diesel the wider you go but the engine hours will drop.

DrDunc · Feb 1, 2020

Yale said:
Personally I’d say batwing like Spearhead as it’ll travel quicker however @DrDunc got on really well with a certain flail,maybe Kuhn which is just a beast of a machine.

Aye for big acres covered quick I'd vote for the batwing too ?

For a machine that will leave a tremendous finish in thistle ridden grass at up to 20kph, and chew it's way through rush covered bog that the batwing would twist it's PTO shafts at the thought of, I have a kverneland topper with J shaped flail knives (FXJ is the model)

However the kverneland flail is only 8 foot wide, so if it's a fair bit longer than batwing does on the easier ground.

GeorgeK · Feb 1, 2020

By the end of the first year you will be well and truly tired of cutting off blackgrass seed heads, the stuff never gives up, so go wide. Also it will spring back up in the wheel tracks so a week or two after cutting you will have to go again to take out the stripes anyway.
Best way to stop thick cuttings clumping together and building up is to cut more often so again, go wide. Rotaries are much quicker to sharpen than flails too

yellowbelly · Feb 1, 2020

Either.......

or...........

Just sayin'

Frank-the-Wool · Feb 1, 2020

I am only a simple livestock farmer and do have a batwing topper which if the grass gets away makes a fantastic job of cutting and mulching it. You do need quite a few horse power but I presume as an arable farmer this won't be an issue.
However what puzzles me is that if you have a Blackgrass problem I would have thought there were much better options than planting some really awful grass mixes which do little or nothing for the wildlife and will only take nutrients out of your soils. You are in an area where there is a good demand for high quality hay or to plant forage crops that could be grazed by sheep. 300 acres is a large enough block to make this work and if you decide to go back into cropping again leaves you more flexibility.
I guess there are no fences or boundaries but I think you would regret going into one of these schemes, we winter graze some of this stewardship grass and until it naturally replaces with clover and better grass it will almost starve the hardiest sheep.

Yale · Feb 1, 2020

Feldspar said:
Apologies if this is a stupid question, but how much do bat-wings shred the cuttings? I guess not much. Might it be a strategy, where it's allowed, to just mow an extra time or two so that you're cutting shorter lengths, or would it be better just to go through once with a flail? I assume a flail mower is also more expensive to maintain (and more power hungry)?

Ballpark, how much faster can you go with a batwing versus a flail?

I’d say with plenty of horses on the front you can do a leisurely 5mph,crank it up and go 7 mph or if you can sit in the seat go 10 mph if the grass is cutting OK.

I suppose doing 10 mph twice would use similar diesel to 5 mph once.

Id rather cut a little extra and not let the grass get tough.

E_B · Feb 1, 2020

Speaking of Spearhead, this is Mr Lole's new machine. Probably a keen price to get them out there, and you know it'll be well made.

Goweresque · Feb 1, 2020

If you get a rotary, make sure you get one thats easy to clean off. My batwing Spearhead is terrible for that, the 3 sections are basically hollow trash collectors, every time you fold it up all the crap falls into the centre section. I think the current Spearhead models may have been redesigned though.

Feldspar · Feb 1, 2020

E_B said:
Speaking of Spearhead, this is Mr Lole's new machine. Probably a keen price to get them out there, and you know it'll be well made.

That looks a good bit of kit.

Feldspar · Feb 1, 2020

Goweresque said:
Just that its soul destroying sat on a topper for hours and hours making no progress. Especially if you have multiple passes to make over the growing season. And if the material is thin they you'll hardly be using any more diesel the wider you go but the engine hours will drop.

DrDunc said:
Aye for big acres covered quick I'd vote for the batwing too ?

For a machine that will leave a tremendous finish in thistle ridden grass at up to 20kph, and chew it's way through rush covered bog that the batwing would twist it's PTO shafts at the thought of, I have a kverneland topper with J shaped flail knives (FXJ is the model)

However the kverneland flail is only 8 foot wide, so if it's a fair bit longer than batwing does on the easier ground.

GeorgeK said:
By the end of the first year you will be well and truly tired of cutting off blackgrass seed heads, the stuff never gives up, so go wide. Also it will spring back up in the wheel tracks so a week or two after cutting you will have to go again to take out the stripes anyway.
Best way to stop thick cuttings clumping together and building up is to cut more often so again, go wide. Rotaries are much quicker to sharpen than flails too

Take the point about sitting on a topper is a bit of a boring job. That said, a lot of the other jobs now such as spraying, combining are quite high pressure now given the complexity of the machines that a nice job (like the equivalent of rolling before we had to do Avadex that bumped it up from a cruisy job) with a tractor that'll have GPS might not be too that bad. I know it's easy to say that without having done it!

The two options AB15 and AB8 are quite different. The former does need quite a few passes to stop black-grass, and I know what a sod it is for reheading so quickly and lower and lower to the ground. That's why I'm tending towards AB8. Because it's down for nearly five years, it does need a few passes in the first year, but after that the black-grass just becomes a non-issue. Or at least that's what we've found when using this option before over the last 10 years. Then you only have to top it once or twice a year, which is much less of a ball-ache.

I would have thought with a 6m batwing at the speeds being talked about, you're going to cover close to 100ac in a good long day? That's three to six days of mowing in a year.

Feldspar · Feb 1, 2020

Frank-the-Wool said:
I am only a simple livestock farmer and do have a batwing topper which if the grass gets away makes a fantastic job of cutting and mulching it. You do need quite a few horse power but I presume as an arable farmer this won't be an issue.
However what puzzles me is that if you have a Blackgrass problem I would have thought there were much better options than planting some really awful grass mixes which do little or nothing for the wildlife and will only take nutrients out of your soils. You are in an area where there is a good demand for high quality hay or to plant forage crops that could be grazed by sheep. 300 acres is a large enough block to make this work and if you decide to go back into cropping again leaves you more flexibility.
I guess there are no fences or boundaries but I think you would regret going into one of these schemes, we winter graze some of this stewardship grass and until it naturally replaces with clover and better grass it will almost starve the hardiest sheep.

It is an interesting point what it will do to the soil. I have found black-grass can't survive in long-term grass options, so I'm not too worried about it for AB8. We've had AB8 around the farm for about 10 years now and black-grass is non-existent now. If well established, I think it does offer a wildlife benefit (and I guess the government bods must think so otherwise they wouldn't have designed it). I'll try and find a good picture of it in its prime, but it is a nice sight. Get a lot of grey partridges using it to nest and feed their chicks, and it does become alive with pollinators when the flowers are out. Hares like it too.

Taking the nutrients out of the soil is a point of concern. I know some people like @B'o'B are going into the AB15 option to use the rooting and legume elements to build fertility in the soil. I think you might be right though that AB8, which often is not turning over huge amounts of biomass, might leave the soil in not as good a nick as you might hope given it'll be in for 5 years. I guess the organic boys must think rotational leys do something for them, but are they using very different mixes?

Haven't really considered growing grass for hay. We have Newmarket not too far away and I know there are people who grow stuff for this market (@Flat 10?). Seems quite a specialist job though? Growing for forage has the issues of our soil type. It's all quite heavy clay and so having stock on the fields during the winter can be messy. See more livestock when you get towards the A505 when the soil gets a lot lighter. I don't rule this out as an option, but whether it would it be worth gearing up for a new job on this area?

Best mower for 300ac of stewardship grass

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