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drum mowers

S

steven in Tn

Member
ive been looking at drum mowers online and think it would be a upgrade from my wore out sickle mower, i only cut about 40 acres a year so 20 acres a cutting. my main concern is the way the mowers leave the grass in a windrow. is this a big problem with drying or not that big of a deal? i dont want to have to run tedder over it everytime. with sickle mower i can usually cut it and bale it 2 or 3 days later.
 
Unless it is a very thick crop the rowing is not that serious actually. They usually have a swath board you can adjust to leave a wider row. I must say though the advantages of a drum / disc mower over a sickle far outweigh that slight disadvantage.
 
I have two seasons experience with mine. Don't see a great difference in drying times. I have a MINOSagri 190. When I rake I straddle one windrow, and rake two together with a 5 bar 3pt rake. Makes superb windrows for baling.
 
This topic has been kicked around here and on another www site somewhat lately so there is a paper trail if you are interested.

On the ww, "different strokes for different folks" to quote a comedy. I like them because it gives me a clean cut line into the next row, plus it gives my tires a place to be for the next lap other than on top of the previously cut row. My drum is a 6' as is the tire spacing on my tractor, and my crimper for stalky crops and my baler pretty much....everything fits.

In the pictures I posted, the windrows, were definitely a necessity with the size of the crop.

Over the years, I had 3 JD 1209s and they have the ability to have one or drop the deflector and scatter the crop. I always kept the deflector out of the way and rowed.

Only time I needed a tedder was WITH a sickle bar in an irregular field. The bar would make piles in the turns and just a big mess along with clogs from crawdad mounds and fire ant hills and wet grass.

HTH,
Mark
 
The picture about 2 pages past this one on the same subject is really blurred. Hope I'm not breaking the site rules here but go to Tractor by net and in general forums go to the last entry which is haying. In there I have a couple of clear pictures of my 6' drum's wws with the crop you see.

I keep pushing drums as I have spent a lot of time researching the subject and 35 years of farming. I wanted "something better" for my scaled down retirement farming and I am happy with my purchase and decision. I think others of the same mind might benefit also so I try to help them too.

HTH,
Mark
 
With a heavy crop and marginal drying weather, you'd probably want to ted it and spread it out. But with hot weather, you won't see much difference from sickle bar in drying time. And oh, so much nicer to use!

BTW, you don't get the windrowing effect with a disc mower, as you do with a drum. But higher power requirements, and more expensive.
 
While I'm not convinced that you'll have much of a problem, Reese drum mowers have your solution. They offer a simple windrow spreader for their 3pt drum mowers.

With that said, I have had both disc mowers and drum mowers. I much perfer disc mowers. I have a 4drum Reese mower now just for mowing garbage areas that I won't take a good moco into. It takes a ton of power. In heavy reed canary I need 120hp minimum. Plus drum mowers seem to like to wrap reed canary on the drums in the worst conditions. Disk mowers just take less power and work smoother normally. The flip side is that drum mowers run over about anything, and even if you break them they can usually be repaired relatively cheaply. This is almost never the case with a disc mower. Repairs seem to always be major ones!
 
We upgraded from a sickle bar mower to a drum mower about two years ago, one of the best things we ever did! Once you use a drum mower you won't want to go back to a sickle bar mower. I have a SFI 165 two drum mower and it cuts as fast as I can drive the tractor down the row. Blades last me about 2 to 3 cuttings of 30 acres of bahia,coastal and rye mixed grass.
The windrow the mower leaves has not been a problem for us.
The drum mower just works and as long as you keep sharp blades on it it always works.
I will admit that the sickle bar mower left the most perfect cut, when we could get it to actually CUT and not plug in our Bahia grass.
Andrew
 
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