There was plenty of feeding, bedding and livestock
handling equipment on show at this year's Dairy Event and Livestock
show, as David Cousins and Emily Padfield report.
This year's event featured a new handler demo area, where
telehandlers and front loaders from makers as diverse as Ausa,
Merlo, Deere, New Holland, Claas, MF, Redrock, Kramer and Alo were
put through their paces shifting bales on and off a trailer,
loading muck and moving fertiliser bags and wrapped round
bales.
This compact T204H telehandler from Spanish firm
Ausa (below) got its first showing at an agricultural event. It
will lift 2t to a height of 4.2m and its compact dimensions - just
1.6m wide and 2m tall - means it's ideal for those with cramped
yards and buildings. It has a 54hp Kubota engine and retails at
£30,800.
Dutch firm Lely, like a number of other big equipment firms, is
putting a lot of investment into robotic livestock equipment. It
has sold 5000 robot milkers around the world on the basis of their
labour-saving and cow welfare-friendly qualities. Its
Discovery robot muckscraper (below) designed to work on slatted
floors, is gradually building up a UK customer base with nearly 20
sold.
This unmanned £10,000 self-recharging unit works round the
clock, using sonar to avoid obstacles. It also scores on the
welfare front compared with mechanical and tractor-mounted
scrapers, as it does its work almost unnoticed by cows.
Lely's Commodus cubicle (below), announced this time last year,
has finally gone on sale. Its plastic cubicle dividers, lack of
side rails and rubber-mounted top rail all help cow welfare. The
top rail can also be removed completely if a cow needs to be
shifted. Cost is £200 a cow, including the mounting frame that
bolts into the concrete floor.
Thomas and Fontaine, which has offered an Environment
Agency-approved tyre-baling service (below) for the past two years,
reports that it has just baled its millionth tyre. Impressive, but
with an estimated 50m-150m redundant car tyres still knocking about
on UK livestock farms, there is some way to go before the national
tyre surplus is dealt with.
Most popular uses for the 120-tyre wired bales are for
reinforcing otherwise-boggy gateways (four bales plus 50-150mm of
aggregate on top) or around ring feeders (4-6 bales plus woodchips)
or water troughs. Baling cost is 50-70p a tyre.
JF-Stoll was showing this Brick 2008DE (below) new straw plus
silage feeder/bedder from French maker Belair. It has a 2.5cu m
capacity and can be trailed or linkage mounted. It can chop and
feed out silage or straw and is aimed at beef and dairy farmers
alike. Cost is £13,250 for the linkage-mounted version.
JF-Stoll's Martin Holden also reported that 2008 was proving to
be its best year for trailed forager sales for five years, as
contractors traded in smaller self-propelleds for the extra
flexibility of a big trailed machine like its FC1355. A metal
detector will be available soon, too.
French firm
Lucas G is
best known in the UK for its straw bedders, but this Qualimix 200M
feeder (below) shows it makes bigger kit, too. This £36,000 20cu m
feeder has two contra-rotating rotors on one side of the machine,
the top one with knives for cutting and the lower one for mixing.
On the other side, there's also a large mixing paddle. It claims to
be able to cut and mix a load in less than three minutes.
Leicester firm
Capital
Seating and Vision had a range of camera and monitor systems
for keeping an eye on otherwise-unseen parts of combines, potato
harvesters, tractor hitches and seed drill hoppers. The cheapest
system on offer has a black-and-white camera with infra-red for
night-time viewing and microphone, plus a 4.5in monitor for £165 +
VAT.
At the other end of the scale you can opt for a 9in split-screen
system (below) that can show images from up to four colour cameras
simultaneously for £580. These are all wired systems. The firm
plans to introduce a wireless version, but says it first needs to
sort out the interference problems that can plague wirelss
technology.
As regulations on slurry storage and odour toughen, closed
storage systems like this Eco-Bag from Dutch firm
Wiefferink
start to look attractive. Capable of holding 200-5000cu m of
slurry, the 0.8mm-thick green pvc material lasts for 20 years. It
requires an earth bund around it and slurry is pumped in via a
valve underneath.
Visually unintrusive and odour-free, it costs £20-£25/cu m -
cheaper, it says, than concrete equivalents. It can also be
dismantled, moved and set up again in another location. Wiefferink
says it sells about £150 units a year in its home market.
UK sales will be through
Biogas
Nord at Templecombe, Somerset.
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