Profi July 2021

Tractor design has come on a long way in the 25 years that profi international has been on the go. But two things remain pretty much consistent across most makes of tractor. There's never enough room in the standard toolbox, and, as sure as rust is brown (don’t go all pedantic, telling me it's also red, orange or black, depending on the level of decay), the thin coat of paint on wheel rims soon starts to melt away. How is it that in this age of a tractor being capable of steering itself, manufacturers seem unable to do a better job of making paint stick to metal for more than two or three years? Is it that wheel rims are just produced to a price? Or is it that the…

McConnel is testing a remote-controlled Robocut work platform that can identify dock leaves in grassland and selectively spray them with individually controlled nozzles. In development for 18 months, the aim is to develop an autonomous system capable of identifying and spraying weeds without significant human labour. The power unit of the prototype is a 56hp Robocut RC56 fitted with Trimble GPS guidance. The spot sprayer utilises a digital camera to capture dock leaf images. A ground speed radar monitors forward speed. The rest of the hardware includes an 80-litre spray tank with electric pump, a 1.5m spray boom and the nine Teejet PWM spray valves to reduce the amount of chemical slurred before and after targeting. A microcomputer provides the required processing power to make the system work. There are still…

Initially designed for a customer to run in front of a 4.0m folding cultivator to chop and cut directly into baked ploughed land, the front mounted disc cultivator has now joined Agriweld’s expanded range of cultivation equipment. Two depth wheels to aid stability and the 32x510mm diameter concave discs (on a 4.0m machine) are said to make light work of clods and clumps. Disc units are protected by rubber suspension and have a scraper to clean the inner wall of the disc, and driving each pair of discs together reduces the possibility of an individual disc stalling. The unit can also be used independently, or in front of the company’s Min-Dis minimum disturbance sub-soiler to create a fine tilth to encourage chitting.…

The Terrasem mulch seed drill is the latest Pöttinger machine to benefit from the Tegosem 500 cover crop sowing unit. Already available on Lion power harrows, Fox compact combination harrows, Terradisc disc harrows and Synkro stubble cultivators, on the Terrasem the cover crop unit can feed additional fertiliser and micro-granules directly into the drill’s metering system. Mounted in front of the seed hopper and accessible using the loading platform, the Tegosem’s pneumatic seeding unit can also be used for the surface application of companion crops, such as grass, which is applied between the tyre packer and the coulter bar.…

Sharing the same coulter line, multi hopper capacity and electronic system as the existing Sky Agriculture 4.0m and 6.0m pneumatic models from Opico, the W8020 (8.0m) Fertisem EasyDrill is available with up to four hoppers. The ISObus ready 8.0m drill can be specified with E-Drive premium. This offers left and right section control as well as touch-button controlled electronic row shut off for individual outlets. Row spacing is 16.6cm and all 48 coulters have seed and fertiliser outlets. The 250kg coulter pressure provides the versatility to drill directly into hard stubbles, cultivated soil and through cover crops. Weight can be transferred hydraulically between the front and rear press wheels. “The ability to seed from four hoppers at once allows so many possibilities e.g. mixed cover crops/companion cropping/small seeds/slug pellets to be…

Designed for grass, but able to handle all types of seeds including beans, Weaving Machinery’s Fenix 3000M (3.0m) is described as an high-spec entry-level direct drill. Aimed at smaller mixed farms looking to move less soil or reseed grass without ploughing, the 32- row drill comes with an Accord metering unit (seeding rates from 1.8-400kg/ha). Grass is cut by two rows of 405mm diameter steel discs (90kg pressure), after which seed exits the cultivator points. The discs are fixed to individual holders and secured with rubber shock absorbers and the distance between the first and the second coulter row is 60cm. There are two diameters of cast iron ring rollers; 450mm and 500mm. Moving on the inner side of the smaller ring, the larger ring is said to prevent material from sticking to…