Harvesters – Motorized harvester – Including plural operating units and drive
Patent
1979-11-30
1983-08-16
Hafer, Robert A.
Harvesters
Motorized harvester
Including plural operating units and drive
56 164, 56DIG1, A01D 1402
Patent
active
043983847
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
The present invention relates to the conditioning of crops especially, but not exclusively, grasses, and provides an improved crop-conditioning apparatus and method.
Forage crops such as grasses which are surplus to immediate requirements are usually cut and field dried to provide animal fodder, particularly hay or silage, for the feeding of animals when fresh forage crops are not available. In temperate, especially maritime climates, the crops are at risk between cutting and harvesting (i.e. the field exposure time) because the adverse effects of light and rain and micro-organism activity can product appreciable nutrient and dry matter losses. Accordingly, it is important to minimize the field exposure time to reduce the risk of such losses. However, the crops cannot be harvested until they have dried to a sufficiently high dry matter content for safe storage as animal fodder. In the case of hay, a dry matter content of about 80% is usually required.
The speed at which surface and sap moisture evaporate from the cut crop during field exposure depends inter alia on the physical condition of the crop. The principal barrier to moisture loss is the cuticle and the layer of epicuticular wax on the crop surface, and it is now common practice in agriculture to mechanically treat the crop in order to damage this barrier. Such mechanical treatment, which may take the form of crushing, lacerating, bruising, splitting, bending or scuffing the stem and leaves of the crop, is known as "conditioning". A variety of conditioning devices have been used or proposed (e.g. as in UK Pat. Nos. 588,439 (Chilton), 662,303 (Goodall), 1,368,682 (Bucher Guyer) and 1,322,165 (NRDC) but not are entirely satisfactory. In particular, known conditioning devices often cause undesirable deep tissue damage to the crop, resulting in high dry matter losses; are unsatisfactory (by reason of their complexity, weight and/or cost) for use with crop cutters (i.e. mowing machines) of greater than 3.5 m width; and usually have metal components which are liable to break during use and damage forage harvesters collecting the field dried crop.
Desirably a crop conditioning device should satisfy the following criteria: strength and resistance to leaching substantially intact; treatment requirements; stones, and to blockage by the crop; settling.
In addition, the device should be relatively inexpensive to manufacture and maintain and readily adaptable to mowing machines of any width.
In a previously constructed experimental crop conditioning implement (of which the inventor named in this application was a co-inventor, and which is described in our published UK Patent Specification No. 1,322,165 with reference to FIGS. 1 to 5 of that specification) a conditioning rotor was provided with conditioning elements which consisted of elongated flat strips of rubber fixedly secured to an inner, tubular rotating member of the rotor. In operation, the conditioning elements were thrown outwardly by centrifugal force to operating positions at an angle to radii of the rotor.
This machine suffered from a number of disadvantages, including the lack of abrasiveness and of penetration into the crop layer of the wide rubber strips, and the considerable power required to drive the rotor at a rate sufficient to maintain the relatively heavy rubber strips in an outwardly directed operating position. Other disadvantages were that when a rubber strip became deflected from its operating position, the restoring effect provided by the material of the rubber strip itself to return the strip to its operative position was small, the return to the operative position being effected mainly by centrifugal force. Consequently, the time taken for the strip to restore to its operative position was significant and during the return time the strip was ineffective for conditioning. Another disadvantage was that under the effect of centrifugal force, the rubber strips lengthened by creep, and fouled the adjacent components of the apparatus. Thus the effective diameter of the rotor was not cons
REFERENCES:
patent: 3487612 (1970-01-01), Keller et al.
patent: 4021995 (1977-05-01), Hill
patent: 4055037 (1977-10-01), Oosterling et al.
Hafer Robert A.
National Research Development Corporation
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