Mowing

Recently, I've been mowing.

The machine the tractor is attached to, is a mower conditioner, with some kind of convoyer belt in the back part. The mower has 7 "plates", each of which have two 7-8 cm long knives in them. They go 1000 rounds per minute, a bit more, I guess. They cut the grass. Green mass then goes to the back of the machine, where is the conditioner which is an axel that has "fingers", which are roughltly 25 cm long. They go also about 1000 rounds per minute (?) and they hit the grass, smash it, treat it with violence, and throws it to the back of the machine - there are sheets of metal, that directs the flow of the mass to one swath.

The machine is 3.2 meters width and the swath is appr. 1.2 - 1.4 meters width. You get a single swath if you don't use the convoyer. Every 2. drive, you low it down. It starts to round, throwing the green mass to the side of the machine - on top of the previous swath. You get double as big swath and their number will be only half. It means lesser driving with big forage equipment on the field.

You can mow 2-4 hectacres per hour. On a good field, you  can drive up to 17 kmh but usually, it's somewhere between 10 to 14 kmh.

In the picture, there's a  "butterfly swath", which has a total of three swaths gathered together. It's butterfly swath because if you drive with a butterfly mower conditioner (one mowing unit in front of the tractor and two on either side; the two in the back will "rise up" kinda like butterflies' wings) that has swathing gear in it, it will cut same amount of grass leaving only one swath with only one working width.