At this year’s Agritechnica event Zurn and Garford were showing off their latest equipment directed towards the growing market for machinery orientated towards organic and sustainable farming.
Zurn is a German company best known on the continent for its combine headers, but it also been the parent company of Garford Farm Machinery Ltd of Peterborough since 2019.
Garford, in turn, are widely recognised as being in the vanguard of mechanical weeding in the the vegetable and root crop arena, but it has ambitions on spreading its wings into the cereal sector as well.
This past couple of years has seen many of the established cultivation equipment manufactures snap up smaller companies that had been quietly beavering away producing lightweight harrows and hoes.
Yet the prize of producing a machine that is wide enough to be of practical use in a cereal crop has still eluded them, the major obstacle being that of having keep within legal size limits when folded for transport.
Garford has overcome this problem with its Robocrop Interrow 12NT. The company claims that the technology employed enables large-scale farmers to cultivate around 1,000ha of land at 18ha/h with only one 12m hoe, on which the two 6m side-shifting platforms track accurately on the seed rows of a 6m drill.
This innovation increases area outputs and offers maximum flexibility in terms of drilling widths. Yet the whole machine, when folded, fits within the 3m wide X 4m high gauge.
The semi-mounted hoe is designed around a central beam that is coupled to the tractor’s lower link arms. The rear end of the beam is carried by the steered and telescoping axle of the running gear, allowing it to follow a range of track widths.
To increase capacity further it can be specified with up to 6 side shifting platforms, each carrying its own cameras and a separate control system.
High level harvesting
Another machine unique to Zurn is its Top Cut Collect. This is something of a novel concept in that instead of harvesting a cereal crop, it runs at a level just above the ears and cuts off any weed stalks and seed heads that stick out above it.
The harvested weed ears are then directed towards a cross conveyor which takes them to a collection hopper towed behind. It is, in effect, a lightweight harvester on stilts.
The earlier versions did not have the collection facility, allowing the weed seeds to fall to the ground where they might germinate. By placing them in a hopper for disposal elsewhere, the weed burden is greatly reduced.