The inventor of the original shearbucket has returned to the market with a revised design that has twice the capacity and apparently delivers a cleaner cut.

William Taylor’s alternative silage grabber uses horizontally actuating jaws to bite into the clamp face, rather than having to drive a traditional shearbucket’s knife edges into it.

It can also be used to strip a round bale of wrap and net ready to feed.

A lot of development work has been put into the geometry of the jaws and hydraulic rams. Mr Taylor says this has helped produce a cleaner cut by reducing the scratching and scraping of the pit wall compared with a traditional shearbucket.

It’s also easier to get it positioned against the clamp, as the jaws open out to 180deg.

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The biting mechanism can be built to suit any size of machine, from dinky handlers and tractor loaders up to industrial-grade loading shovels feeding huge dairies.

The current prototype uses two 4ft 6in heads, so can carry twice the material of an equivalent shearbucket. It weighs 1t, though it may be less by the time the full production version is built.

The increased capacity means tractors and telehandlers will have to make fewer trips between the pit and mixer wagon, which should save on fuel, tyre wear and engine hours.

The new machine is currently in prototype form, so is running second-hand cutting heads, but Mr Taylor is looking for a manufacturer to take on his patent-protected design.

The prototype been busy working on a 200-cow dairy near Coleraine, Northern Ireland, for the past couple of years. Apparently, the operator is saving almost an hour a day thanks to the reduced time it takes to fill the diet feeder.

Mr Taylor has a track record in this market, having invented the first shearbucket in 1994 before setting up licensing agreements with several companies until the patent expired in 2014.