Forage wagon Wholecrop?

[Weare Cham]

Has anyone successfully tried doing barley/ oats/vetch silage with a forage wagon? I'm guessing grain ripeness would have to be spot on or a chopper with a corn cracker would be needed.

 

[Great In Grass]

I have have a customer who went from growing maize (converted to organic) to growing a 10% Vetch, 40% Peas & 50% Spring Barley mix which is all fed via a Hi Spec diet feeder (not sure which one) with no problems at all, been doing it for at least 10 years I'd guess.

 

[ploughman1963]

I think the question is whether a forage wagon would harvest it? I suspect it would not do a very good job as you would have to pre-mow it and rake it in order to get any real chopping effect and I suspect the losses would be high - though no higher than a forage harvester without a direct cut header.

 

[Great In Grass]

I think the question is whether a forage wagon would harvest it? I suspect it would not do a very good job as you would have to pre-mow it and rake it in order to get any real chopping effect and I suspect the losses would be high - though no higher than a forage harvester without a direct cut header.

Yep, I read it all wrong.

 

[Great In Grass]

I've seen mowers struggle to cut the stuff and in some cases not at all, so I wouldn't hold out much hope for a forage wagon.

 

[Weare Cham]

Thanks all. Tempted to try it on a small field next year still.....

 

[bigw]

If you can bale wholecrop then why couldn't you cut it with the wagon.

 

[ploughman1963]

The wagon would handle it - just whether you would get a short enough chop? We do Lucerne with a forage wagon and we get a higher percentage of long material than I would like to see. However, we have just tried a Pottinger with a much closer knife spacing and that may well manage a better chop length.

 

[jamesy]

Back in the dim distant past I used to pick up a barley/pea mix with my wagon, I wasn't worried about chop length though & my wagon was only of the size that required 1 10ft row. Conditioner screwed off as far as possible. It was grand.

 

[Weare Cham]

Back in the dim distant past I used to pick up a barley/pea mix with my wagon, I wasn't worried about chop length though & my wagon was only of the size that required 1 10ft row. Conditioner screwed off as far as possible. It was grand.

This is what I'm hoping. What were you feeding it to?

 

[jamesy]

It was young cattle, sandwiched in pit between grass cuts

 

[wdah/him]

bale wholecrop every year, sometimes with peas. peas can be a balls for weeds b ut is always cut at cheesy stage and with a drum mower only. addiditive used and bales not chopped, not as much lose as u would think

 

[Haythers]

Has anyone successfully tried doing barley/ oats/vetch silage with a forage wagon? I'm guessing grain ripeness would have to be spot on or a chopper with a corn cracker would be needed.

I once did some whole crop oats for somebody I worked for because he had undersown grass so he was trying to get more wilt on it, I found that when rowing it up I had to go against the mower swath to rake it in properly otherwise it would leave some and after 3 loads trial we decided it wasn't chopping short enough (partly to do with his wagon it would struggle to chop warm butter) but in the end a self propelled came and picked it all up.
Little tip to chop it better though move the floor manually rather than in auto pilot and make it struggle a bit, the back pressure seems to make it chop better

 

[gatepost]

I used to, old Pottinger picked up straight out of the swath, a bit slow but worked well, more difficult getting consolidaded at the clamp, better when we had a bit of 2nd cut grass to top off with, and stopped the first rat, before he went back and told his mates