Combine header attachments for harvesting soybeans, canola, lentils, beans, chickpeas, light barley, wheat, durum, radish, and even sunflowers
Photo & Video Credit: Oliver Cryns
By Denise Faguy
Farms.com
When it comes time to harvest, farmers want to maximize every grain of their crop and not lose any crop in the harvesting process. There are many tools that can be added to your equipment to help maximize your harvest and save time. Most notably there are several brushes and relay systems the Farms.com team thinks are very cool.
Farms.com recently spoke with Phil Reddekopp, director of sales and marketing for Flexxifinger QD Industries. Reddekopp introduced the Farms.com team to the Flexxifinger’s brush system called The FlexxiSweep™.
“For crops that are short on your harvester, as your real bats are going around and round and not bringing the products in,” says Reddekopp. But if you add brushes, “The brushes are cut to the same length as the fingers you put them on on a spiral. Every rotation of your real bar comes around and sweeps that knife clean, puts that product on your hopper and your bushels per acre are increased because of it.”
The FlexxiSweep™ can be helpful not only for crops that are short, but also for thin, light, or feathery crops. Whenever normal finger tine would have trouble feeding a crop onto the header. It can be used to harvest soybeans, canola, lentils, beans, chickpeas, light barley, wheat, durum, and radish.
It has strong nylon brushes, 46” (117 cm) in length, 12 lbs. (5.4 kg) each, and attaches quickly and securely, with no modification to the reel. The Flexxifinger website says that the panels are staggered “to have the entire knife swept once per revolution of the reel.” It also showed that the header can be adjusted higher, to leave longer stubble in cereal crops.
Next up with Reddekopp was the FlexxiSelect™ which eases the harvest of a relay intercrop by protecting the growing points of a pulse when harvesting the mature cereal. The FlexxiSelect can be easily installed on a combine header, in just a matter of minutes.
Why should you bother? According to Flexxifinger with relay intercropping farmers can increase soil sustainability and field health; intercropping often results in a higher return when compared to the returns on the same amount of mono cropped acreage.
“This product just snaps onto your header, it can come on and off quickly and is adjustable,” says Reddekopp. “It glides over top of your soybean because it's not ready to harvest yet, but the wheat needs to be cut. You cut the wheat, you expose the soybean to sunlight, and it just pops up and grows, and you have a second crop in the same field same year.”
Reddekopp then shared the Flexxifinger crop lifters, "We've got plastic tipped ones that are solid. They are meant to be loose, just so that they can bounce around and move side to side if there are rocks or anything. And we have also got what we call our Flexi float, which is an all-cast metal lifter, very durable and it has got rotation in the center so it can follow ground undulations such as sprayer tracks.”
The cool thing about all of these products is how easily and quickly they can come on and off of your header. Reddekopp says “It takes 5 to 10 minutes to fill a complete header with lifters, and five to 10 minutes to have it all cleared off.”
Reddekopp also shared a product specifically for sunflower growers with a regular draper head. “Solid real bats that just set over top of the real bars and attached really easily and quickly and marry that with this sunflower harvesting pan which also goes on and off as quickly as the lifters.” This product allows sunflower farmers to harvest sunflowers with a regular combine header.
For more information, watch the Cool Tool Video below.