Build quality and back up helps baler purchase decision

When Morpeth beef and sheep farmer Andrew Scott looked to replace his Krone round baler two years ago, he didn’t have to look too far for a replacement. His current baler was the sixth Krone baler he had bought over the previous 20 years, so his seventh was a Comprima F 125 XC fixed chamber baler, specifically designed for producing 1.25m round silage bales.

Mr Scott would normally be thinking about changing his baler after two seasons in readiness for the coming season but at the moment he sees no reason to do so as it was running so well at the end of last season. The baler is usually powered by a Massey Ferguson 6480 and can average around 60 bales an hour, but on one occasion last summer achieved an output of 100 bales in an hour.

Mr Scott farms 350 acres of grassland farm which supports a suckler herd of 45 stabiliser cows with followers sold as store cattle and 500 Mule, Suffolk Cross and Texel Cross ewes. All the machinery on the farm is purchased with the sole intention of providing good quality forage for his livestock.

“With just farming beef and sheep there is not much need for machinery on the farm, but I do need good and reliable silage making equipment,” he says. “The only way I can afford this equipment is to provide contract baling services for several neighbours. I now own a Krone mower, tedder and baler, and bale around 7-8000 bales per year.”

Mr Scott bought his first Krone around 20 years ago and six machines later he has seen little reason to change. The support from Krone and equally as important, dealers Carrs Billington, is second to none and – no problem is too big to solve.

“Quite often problem solving can be done over the phone without a callout. The machines also arrive on the farm ready for work. There is no need for any service engineer to come out and set it up – you just load the net wrap and you’re ready to go.”

His new Comprima baler is equipped with a rotor cutter feed which not only cuts and feeds the crop into the baler, it also takes care of the pre-compression of the crop. The Krone X-Cut rotor cutters feature three rows of welded tines in chevron formation, which provide for continuous cuts and help spread the material uniformly across the entire chamber width.

The baler is fitted with the camless EasyFlow pick-up, which means that the galvanised scrapers are specifically designed to ensure a continuous flow of crop as the tines retract. This means that the baler can gather the crop cleanly at a higher speed.

It also has the NovoGrip system which was developed by Krone to combine the bale feed strengths of chain and slat elevators with the quiet running of belt systems. An endless elevator has slats mounted on rubber belts which ensure high-density well shaped bales.

“The other advantage of this system is that it is much quieter than any other baler I’ve known,” says Mr Scott.