Hay rake
A hay rake is an agricultural rake used to collect cut hay or straw into windrows for later collection (e.g. by a baler or a loader wagon). It is also designed to fluff up the hay and turn it over so that it may dry. It is also used in the evening to protect the hay of the dew. The next day a tedder is used to spread it again, so that the hay dries more quickly.
Kinds of hay rakes
A hay rake may be mechanized, drawn by a tractor or draft animals, or it may be a hand tool. The earliest hay rakes were nothing more than tree branches, but wooden hand rakes with wooden teeth, similar in design to a garden rake but larger, were prevalent in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and still are used in some locations around the world.
The typical early horse-drawn hay rake was a dump rake, a wide two-wheeled implement with curved steel or iron teeth usually operated from a seat mounted over the rake with a lever-operated lifting mechanism. This rake gathered cut hay into windrows by repeated operation perpendicular to the windrow, requiring the operator to raise the rake, turn around and drop the teeth to rake back and forth in order to form the windrow. In some areas, a sweep rake, which could also be a horse-drawn or tractor-mounted implement, could then be used to pick up the windrowed hay and load it onto a wagon.
Later, a mechanically more complicated rake was developed, known as the side delivery rake. This usually had a gear-driven or chain-driven reel mounted roughly at a 45-degree angle to the windrow, so the hay was gathered and pushed to one side of the rake as it moved across the field. A side delivery rake could be pulled longitudinally along the windrow by horses or a tractor, eliminating the laborious and inefficient process of raising, lowering, and back-and-forth raking required by a dump rake. This allowed for the continuous spiraling windrows of a classic mid-20th century farm hayfield. Later versions of the side delivery rake used a more severe transverse angle and a higher frame system, but the basic principles of operation were the same.
Still later, a variety of wheel rakes or star wheel rakes were developed, with 5, 6, 7 or more spring-tooth encircled wheels mounted on a frame and ground driven by free-wheeling contact as the implement was pulled forward. These rakes were variously promoted as being mechanically simpler and trouble-free, gentler on the hay than a side-delivery rake, and cheaper to operate. Currently a newer design called the rotary rake is in common use in Europe, and less frequently seen in the United States and Canada.
Conditioner (farming)
A conditioner (or hay conditioner) is an agricultural machine that crimps and crushes newly cut hay to promote faster and more even drying. Drying the hay efficiently is most important for first crop hay, which consists of coarse stalks that take a longer period of time to draw out moisture than finer textured hays, such as second crop cuttings.
A conditioner is made up of two grooves rollers which the hay is forced through causing the stalks to split, thus giving more surface area for moisture to escape. The stand-alone conditioner is now an obsolete piece of machinery since it has been incorporated into both haybines and mower-conditioners.
Mower-conditioners
Mower-conditioners, MoCo’s in casual conversation, are a staple of large-scale haying. Mower-conditioners are defined by the mechanisms that accomplish mowing and conditioning.
There are three types of mowers; sickle bar mowers, disc mowers, and drum mower. Sickle bar mowers use a reciprocating knife to cut the grass and typically use a reel to fold the grass over the knife. Disc mowers have a number of hubs across the cutting width, each hub having a small (18″) rotating disc with knives. Drum mowers use two or three large rotating plates (called the drums, about 36″ across) which ride over the ground as they are spinning. A sickle bar mower’s main advantage over disc mower and drum mower is the reduced horsepower requirements. Its disadvantage is the extra maintenance required due to the high number of moving parts and wear items. Disc mowers were historically considered an “all the eggs in one basket” kind of mower because all the mower hubs were one large gearbox. If one blade hit something and a gear tooth broke the whole gearbox would suffer a catastrophic failure and there would be nothing worth fixing. If anything broke, everything broke. Drum mowers prevented this by having typically two belt-driven drums compared to 6 or more gear-driven hubs. Modern disc mowers use isolated gearboxes and if one fails it can be swapped out without rebuilding the entire machine.
Conditioners come in three main types: rubber-roller conditioners, steel-roller, and flail. The roller conditioners consist of two opposing rolls that have a raised, interlocking chevron pattern. The rollers have either a rubber or steel chevron pattern and a steel main shaft. The crop is crimped between the rollers, decreasing the drying time. The flail conditioner is an arrangement of steel V’s on a main shaft that beat the crop against the top of the mower-conditioner. The flail conditioner reduces drying time by removing the waxy coating on the crop.
Haybine is the brand name of the first mower-conditioner. It combined the sickle bar mower and the hay conditioner to promote faster drying hay all in one process. The current versions produced by New Holland are branded the Discbine, since they now feature faster disc mowers.
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