PRACTICAL TEST: In Italy we were able to make up for what we were unable to do in our practical test last season. Near Verona, the Fendt self-propelled showed off its strong throughput and impeccable cutting quality.
Harvesting the maize in northern Italy wasn’t easy, either. The Katana had plenty to chomp on, with the crop yielding 61t/ha, and, despite being irrigated, the cobs on the Dekalb DKC6812 had small, rubbery kernels, making them more difficult to crack. To handle this, the cracker rollers had to remain relatively close together, just 1.75mm during our throughput and chop length measurements. The speed differential was set at 40%. The only difference to our otherwise identical Katana 850 from last year was the speed difference of the rollers. The 40mm chopping drum and the Kemper 490 plus attachment were the same as what we had last season. We varied the crop chop length from 4mm to 13mm. The large field with a uniform crop allowed us to repeat each test run three times.
With a 32-36% DM content, the maize variety yielded an excellent 21t/ha dry matter — see the table “Throughput and fuel consumption” for more details on this.
High throughput
Even when set to a chop length of 4mm, the Katana 850 achieved an FM throughput of almost 260t/hr. At 7mm chop, the throughput increased by 20t to 289t/hr. Each additional 3mm increase in the chop length delivered another 15t/hr of fresh mass into the silage trailer — great! The Fendt foraging flagship model harvested a maximum of 320 tonnes per hour, which is 110t/hr of dry matter or 5.25 hectares per hour.
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