Layering Bales in Comby Feeder Saves Extra Trips to the Field
Are you feeding both balage and straw to the same herd on break fed crops? Find out how this Canterbury farm saved extra trips to the field…
Attracted by New Zealand’s dairy farming industry, Filipe Casagrande shifted from Brazil to Canterbury around 8 years ago. Having put up with the frustration of running a silage wagon for years, Filipe was pleased when the owner of the farm he’d worked for decided to expanded his dairy farming business, giving Filipe the opportunity to step up and manage the new dairy farm in Sheffield with all new farm machinery.
The problem
When feeding bales to balance the diet when cattle are feeding on break crops, the last thing you want is to have to go in and out of the paddock unnecessarily, especially in sub-zero climates and wet periods. That’s exactly what this Canterbury based dairy farmer didn’t want either.
Filipe had struggled for some years trying to feed square bales with a silage wagon, the square balage bales causing most of the frustration, often coming over the elevator in big clumps and getting jammed up, causing delays in feeding out and lots of heavy manual labour trying to clear the blockages.
Filipe and fiancée Kateryna, along with recently immigrated friends who are helping out on the farm
The solution
Needing to feed out big volumes of square bales of balage, straw and loose pit silage on the new dairy farm, Filipe made the choice to run with a Comby feeder. He’s rapt with the way the Super Comby EX has worked out, being much easier to load when loading bales or loose silage, and it allows him to accurately place bales into the bed in the right order, making layering bales possible.
This enables Filipe to layer bales with square balage bales on the bottom and square straw bales layered on top, so when he’s going into the paddock and starts feeding, the Super Comby EX is feeding both straw and balage simultaneously saving him an extra trip into each field.
“It’s easily the best silage wagon on the market,
you can just chuck anything in and it feeds it out”
The Super Comby EX is a smaller feedout wagon at 13m3, which he finds is easier to manoeuvre than his old silage wagon, however it holds the same amount of bales, and can be loaded up with the same amount of clamp silage as his old 17m3 silage wagon. The benefit being improved manoeuvrability and easier loading.
The Super Comby all loaded up with a layered load of balage and straw. Filipe removing the strings with his loader, leaving just one string per bale on the top layer to save any spillages.
Filipe found the new feed out wagon to be very simple and easy to operate and handles any type of feed that they need to feed out.
Take a look at the Combi Feeder in action
