Ploughing Champs success
Sean Leslie and Casey Tilson from Middlemarch, with horses Beau and Dough, took out the Rural News Horse Plough award at the Power Farming NZ Ploughing Championships at Horotiu, near Hamilton, on April 13-14.
Using geolocation of the plough, the system automates furrow entry and exit in order to achieve a straight entry and exit, regardless of working conditions and shape of the plot.
Making its market debut on the new VARI-MASTER L plough range, Kuhan says this innovation offers many technical and agronomic benefits to the farmer. This includes keeping headland overlaps to a minimum, which in turn, improves burial of residues and reduces headland compaction.
Additionally, with the industry being faced with more intensive environmental considerations, Smart Ploughing also helps manage weed growth through better burial, limiting the risk of spread.
For an operator perspective, the automation of the individual body lifts coupled with GPS geolocation simplifies ploughing., allowing the driver to focus solely on driving the tractor.
In addition, the creation of a straight and unbroken boundary between the ploughed land and the headland greatly reduces shocks and shaking during subsequent headland.
Manual management of the plough bodies from the cab provides the driver with the possibility of lifting or lowering one or more bodies in order to adapt to the working conditions, especially when the power requirement becomes too high.
