Dairy News november 13, 2012
machinery & products // 39
Tornado whips up Oz storm chris dingle
BUSINESS IS down but Australian farmer Pete Smith has no plans to part ways with his new Welger Tornado RPC 445 baler/wrapper. Smith, from Tatong in north-eastern Victoria, about 30km south of Benalla, had owned his Welger Tornado for about six weeks when Dairy News caught up with him in the middle of a contracting job on the last day of October. The Tornado is a big unit when you compare it with the usual round balers; it is 5.8m long, 2.8m wide and 3.35m high. Smith operates it with either a
210hp Case Puma 210 or a 110hp Case Maxxum 110. Both appear to handle the job well. He runs a contracting business as well as milking up to 180 cows on his own property with his wife Beth and says that he is lucky to have someone at home looking after the dairy while he’s out contracting. Smith does the morning milking and then heads out on the contracting during the season. It is a mixed herd of Holsteins and crossbreds, they calve in spring and autumn and milking is done in a 10-a-side double-up shed. “We bought this place 10 years ago and resurrected the shed,” Smith says. “The home farm is 132ha and we lease
Peter Smith runs a contracting business as well as milking 180 dairy cows with his wife, Beth.
The Welger Tornado RPC 445 baler/wrapper is a big unit compared with usual round balers.
a further 400ha for Angus cattle and to run the replacement heifers.” Their four children; Stuart, who is 16, Kate 14, Grace 11 and William, 7, are all at school in Benalla. Before he decided to purchase the Tornado, Smith had two Welger 420 balers and a wrapper. He traded one of the balers in on the Tornado, kept the other one and the wrapper was put up for sale. “The Tornado is nice on hay so the other Welger is now for sale,” he says. Smith explains that they had the idea for about two or three years to move up to the baler/wrapper combination; “With the Tornado you don’t have to run a separate tractor.” When it came to making the actual decision to buy he says that he’s found that Welgers are exceptionally good balers with exceptionally good back up. Like many farmers with their machinery, “a lot of it comes down to the dealer”.
The Welger brand is marketed and distributed by Lely Australia and the machine was bought through O’Connor’s in Shepparton. Smith says he gets good service and assistance from them. “The biggest thing was learning the system, the dealer ‘babied’ me along, and once I had learned it, it’s been great.” The baler has a bale chamber diameter of between 0.9 and 1.6m, with a width of 1.23m. In addition to a variable baling chamber, the automatic wrapping system is variable as well. Lely says the time that the Tornado takes to wrap a bale is so short that the output of the variable round baler can be utilised to its full potential. The pick-up width is 2.25m and Welger developed a completely new tine design for this machine.
The baler/wrapper combination averages 73 rolls per hour and Pete uses an inoculant on the bales. It has done 3000 bales in the six weeks that he has owned it, but Pete admits things have not been so good for silage around this district this year. At one stage, he says, he would make 30,000 bales in a year, but there are not as many bales around this year because of the move to spring calving, and farmers preferring to leave the paddocks for grazing, because of the relatively high cost of baling. “This season we’ll do about 6000 bales - it’s a quiet year.” He also runs a Shuitemaker forage wagon for contracting jobs on pit silage, and was flat out on that for three or four weeks. Other equipment in the business includes a Lely mower and a Claas mower, a Vicon mower/conditioner, a Lely tedder and a Vicon Andex rotary rake. Smith says he plans to keep the Welger Tornado running for about the next five years.
The baler has a bale chamber diameter of between 0.9 and 1.6m, with a width of 1.23m.
DEMAND
BLUE NUT
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LEADING WITH KNOWLEDGE