Scotgrass on 14 May in Dumfries, Scotland, is a good chance for farmers to see some of the latest kit on the market. Farmers Weekly has picked a few new machines to look out for

Krone Easycut mowers

Krone’s new range of EasyCut mowers is now isobus compatible and will replace the German firm’s existing mower line-up. The newbies use Krone’s SmartCut system, where the pairs of discs turning outwards are set closer together to increase blade overlap and improve cutting performance in light crops.

The discs turning towards each other are set further apart to provide a larger gap and a smoother flow when mowing in dense crops and steel conditioner tines now have an angled profile for clean cuts.

The front-mounted F320C costs £16,050 and butterfly B1000CV has a £60,050 ticket price, and they have a 10m cutting width in total.

Opico sward slitter

Opico’s new slurry injector piggybacks the Lincolnshire firm’s 6m hydraulic folding sward slitter. It is designed to crack the surface of well-established swards and dribble slurry at the base of grass plants. The company believes this application method offers 85% nutrient efficiency, compared with 20% using a messier splash-plate set-up.

The 6m slit injector dispenses slurry through 36 outlets. These are mounted directly behind each of the four-blade rotors of the sward slitter/aerator.

Opico makes use of a Vogelsang macerator with a big stone trap and the company’s own heavy duty double swing arm, which should allow for tight headland turns. Working speed is 5-8kph and the slitter folds to 2.55m for transport.

Prices for the slit injector start at £11,978, while the 6m folding sward slitter and injector combined costs £20,512.

Lely Splendimo trailed mower

Lely has revamped its Splendimo PC trailer mower adding a cutterbar, chassis and hood. The modular cutterbar design uses individual gearboxes on each rotor that are driven by driveshafts.

Lely says set-up is more efficient and requires less power to drive than the gear-on-gear drives on some other machines. Switching from a hex to splined driveshaft is also said to improve efficiency.

Lely has also added an extra level of protection by putting shear pins on each disc. These have been designed to give way quickly in the event of a collision, and are quick to replace, too. The mower has also been given a new chassis to help it lift and lower quickly on the headlands. Hoods have been improved and hinge out of the way quickly to give access to the cutterbar.

The 3.3m PC330 costs £16,895 for the side-pull and £17,995 for the centre-pull.

Vicon Extra mowers

Vicon says its latest plain disc mowers, destined for the 2013 silage season, give good cutting quality at low power requirements.

Badged as the Extra 117, Extra 122 and Extra 124, these new entry-level mowers offer working widths of 1.7m, 2.2m and 2.4m and replace the CM1700, CM2200 and CM2400.

All have a fully-welded bed design that uses a three-bladed cutting disc system, which is said to encourage faster regrowth from grass stubbles.

The mowers use a spring-loaded break-away system, while hydraulic headland lift means the mower can be raised without having to move the tractor link arms.

All these design improvements add up to a lower power requirement, says the company, with the Extra 100 Series needing a tractor of just 50hp to operate.

Prices are £4,180 for the Extra 117, £5,225 for the Extra 122 and £5,930 for the Extra 124.

Arcusin bale accumulator

If you’re looking for a quick way to get large numbers of round bales off the field and into the barn the TRB2000 self-loading round bale collector from Canadian company Anderson could be just the thing.

The biggest machine collects 20 4ft bales or 17 5ft bales, but there’s also a 17-bale machine and a 10-bale one.

An extendable arm on one side of the trailer lifts the bale up and deposits it on the trailer deck. The bale then rolls down a slight transverse slope to come to rest at the other side of the trailer.

The second bale is lifted up and allowed to roll next to it. To load the top row, the arm lifts the bale as normal but, once it’s reached 45deg, extends to allow the bale to be neatly placed on top of the existing two bales. Once that’s happened, the rack at the front of the machine then pushes all three bales backwards. This continues until all 20 bales are loaded.

Unloading simply involves tipping the front of the deck to 35deg, at which point all the bales slide off. Cost of the TRB2000 is expected to be about £28,000.