In his quest for better commercial flax fibre, Alvin Ulrich has tried a variety of tricks to get the straw to lie down in a thin, flat, uniform layer on the ground.
Ideally, every piece of flax straw should have direct soil contact so soil microbes can climb on and start their retting process, but the president of Biolin Research said it wasn’t that simple.
“We tried ditch mowers. We tried a couple of Rowse mowers. The land roller did a good job of breaking off the straw and laying it down flat some days, depending on the weather. But it didn’t always work the way we wanted.”
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The inherent design of a ditch mower dictates that it throws the material to the side for safety reasons. In normal operation, road mowers throw the rocks, beer cans and other debris deeper into the ditch.
The problem with other conventional field mowers was that they fling the straw inward so the straw would go through the blades two or three times.
None of this helped Ulrich. The last thing he wanted was flax straw piled up in a windrow on the side of the mower or to have the straw chopped into small pieces. He needed long straw flat on the ground.
He found the straw management tool he was looking for in the Schulte FX-315 Rotary Cutter.
“We removed the chains and lifted the solid shields so it flings the straw out,” he said.
“It has adjustable shields so you can stop the straw from getting passed from one blade to another. The fixed blades it had chopped too much. And the lifter blades didn’t work very well for us. We found the flatter blades worked best for us. They just cut the straw low and lay it flat on the ground. That’s what we’ve been looking for all along. Something like a sickle mower.”
It’s no coincidence that the FX-315 fit the bill. Schulte designed its new cutter specifically for distributing crop residue.
There are enough adjustable components that an operator can make it perform a large number of cutting and distribution functions.
The cutter has a new residue distribution tailboard that is fully adjustable.
The variable position shrouding lets the operator direct the material flow underneath the deck to adjust the amount of shredding and control the distribution of material.
The side skirt is more than 13 inches deep, which contributes to a smooth material flow under the deck.
Schulte said its seven gauge, single dome deck is simpler and lighter than double deck cutters and is also easier to clean. A new feature is the replaceable deck ring.
The Bondioli SFT drive system begins with a 260 horsepower splitter box that feeds two 190 h.p. right angle blade drive boxes. The 80 degree constant velocity joint allows the operator to make tight turns.
The speed levelling system lets the operator make quick adjustments for front to back levelling when switching between different tractor drawbar heights.
Transport width on the FX-315 is slightly more than eight feet.
