Combo Forage Head Chops One Row, Picks Another

Combo Forage Head Chops One Row, Picks Another HAY & FORAGE HARVESTING Forage Harvesters 13-1-3 Chopping one row of corn and picking the ears off the row next to it is a great way to add extra ear corn to silage, according to an Ohio farmer who built his own "combo" harvester. "I've long noticed that the most profit-able dairymen feed high moisture ear corn to cows but, in most cases, smaller dairy operators cannot justify the investment required for extra harvesting and storage equipment. I decided to find an inexpensive and simple way to incorporate ear corn into my operation with home-built equipment," says David C. McCoy, Fredericktown, Ohio. When he started looking into building a pick-chop combo forage harvester, a neighbor told him he was too late because Case had first built such a machine 40 years before. "I looked into it and sure enough they had. But Case's machine picked the ear and sent it to one wagon and then chopped the fodder and blew it into another wagon. I also found that Gehl had built the kind of head I was looking for. They called it a PC head - pick and chop. But Gehl's head fit the old fan-type harvesters which didn't split or crack enough kernals. I've learned that other companies have experimented with the idea over the years but none have built a head for modem, `screenable' harvesters. "I bought a used Deere 38. I stripped the 2-row head down so that only the right side row would be used for chopping whole plant silage. I then bought a 2-row New Holland snapper unit and modified the left half to fit on the Deere head. I then modified the harvester itself like the manufacturer suggests for snapped ear corn use (lengthening the tongue and pto so I could turn without hitting the snout, raising up the machine so I could get the head all the way down for full screen area). The Deere harvester has a 1,000 pto, which helps my 80 hp tractor handle the load. I use 1 1/2-in. screen." McCoy says the biggest advantage of the chop-pick system is that it lets him feed more corn to cows using his existing forage wagons, blower, unloader, auger feeder and 16 by 55 stave silo. The head cost just $300 to build. Another advantage of leaving every other row in the field is that McCoy, who has practiced conservation tillage for 10 years, is able to till the extra stalk residue back into the field. "I have always sown a cover crop of rye, wheat or oats after I remove corn silage. This works great but my farm is rather wet and this `green manure' complicates spring tillage. Now I chop stalks left in the field with a stalk chopper and then lightly till the residue into the soil." McCoy also likes the fact that the combo head lets him harvest corn earlier in the season when there's less weather risk. "I always found it difficult to get corn to dry down enough in the late fall to store without waste in round cribs." One disadvantage of the combo head is that it ensiles "ear corn" a little wetter than the ideal moisture, which you could achieve if you harvested it by itself. Also, because forage and corn are mixed in the field you can't vary the ratio of corn to forage the way you could if they were harvested separately. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, David C. McCoy, Rt. 1, 16413 Old.Mansfield Rd., Fredericktown, Ohio 43019 (ph 614 397-4664).

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