Some sunny scenery in the river forelands on last Monday afternoon. And definitely the last time in 2020 this John Deere farm tractor and Lely tedder were working together on this field.
The John Deere 6330 4WD was offered from 2007 to 2013. It’s powered by a 4.5 liter, four-cylinder diesel engine, turbocharged and intercooled. The engine’s maximum power output is 110 hp. Just perfect for this type of job.
Farmer heading east meets skipper heading west.
The whole picture, without zooming in. In a few months, everything you see here may be flooded. It all depends on how much rain- and meltwater is coming from Germany in the upcoming winter season.
Next episode: after tedding comes raking (just a few miles further, actually, on the same afternoon).
I could look it up, but I suspect others here are also curious: what is “tedding”?
In Dutch, that Lely tedder would be called a Lely (grass) shaker, when translated. I think that explains it quite well. It’s to quicken the drying process of grass, once mowed.
I strongly suspect that’s more of an issue in wetter climates. Out here in the Western US, it hardly ever rains in the summer, so it’s not needed.
When I used to spend time in the summer with the Mennonite farmers in Iowa as a kid, I always came out for haying. They often ran the cut hay through a “crimper”, which also sped up the drying process. It crushed the stems.
The picture below shows a crimper in front of a rake. We did it separately. I spent a lot of time behind the wheel of a Ford N9 or Farmall H crimping and raking hay.
Yes, the climate and short-term weather forecasts are crucial factors for the whole, repeating process of harvesting grass/hay.
Mowing – tedding – raking – baling (or picking it up with a self-loading silage wagon) is the standard procedure here for cutting grass.
Five or six cuts a year is the norm. That would be very hard in a warm and especially dry climate.
In the US it would be referred to as a hay rake or wheel hay rake.
I don’t think so. Raking is the job that comes after tedding.
Right–a tedder is sort of an “anti-rake”. It pulls apart rather than bringing together.
Like Paul said, it’s not as big of an issue in dry regions, but as the climate shifts in our area (SW MN), we’ve found it’s nice to have a small rotary tedder for spreading out grass waterways if they’re too damp. It takes another trip around the field, but it can save an entire day of drying time. Luckily, this year we finally had a dry summer, the first since 2012, so the tedder sat idle.
In our area, four cuttings for grass and alfalfa is the norm, usually cut at the beginning of June, July, August, and September. In the past few years, we’ve attempted fifth cuttings just for bragging rights (the yield is rather poor by then), but the shortening daylight in the fall means that might not be until 5-6 weeks after the fourth. But no matter how many cuttings we get, every alfalfa field gets rotated out after 3 years.
Pictured: Not our particular tedder, but a Kuhn model just like it. It’s quite a bit smaller than the Lely!
Thanks for chiming in. An anti-rake, that’s a good one!
OK, you guys didn’t give me much confidence, so I looked it up. According to Wikipedia, a tedder wuffels the hay, after mowing and before windrowing. Where I live, the only grass grown commercially is not the kind that gets tedded, or even mowed for that matter, and the bulk of our commercial agriculture involves hand picking – strawberries, blackberries, Brussels sprouts, leafy greens – but we do have lots of John Deere equipment in the fields. Looks like a beautiful Autumn in the lowlands.