Fuel consumption disc mower conditioner versus sickle

rockyridgefarm

Well-known Member
I cut 37 acres yesterday with a gehl 2415 and a 4840. Mower calls for 130hp minimum, but I want the weight in the hills. Fueled up at start and fueled up again after 31 gallons. The ground was in 10 fields one was 4.5 miles down the road. Makes roughly .83 gallons per acre, but a lot of fair bit of the fuel was burned in travel between fields. It took about five hours. What would have it taken with a reel and sickle mower conditioner?
 
Used to be about 0.5 gal an acre with our nh489, that?s not
exact though. What I remember more clearly is fixing it all the
time and being impressed it made it through 5 acres without
plugging.

Hard to think about going back after running a discbine.
 
I would bet it would not be much less. You would spend more time getting the job done. Where you cut faster/wider than a sickle mower would have.
 
From my experience in running rotary and sickle headers on SP windrowers I'd say there isn't much
difference in fuel consumption per acre for a given crop condition. Of course the fuel usage per
hour with a rotary is much higher but so is the productivity so the net efficiency is similar.
When actually cutting a self-propelled windrower should cover 2-3 acres per gallon in normal hay
crops. Your economy figure is a lot less because, as you said, it includes road travel and also
probably a lot of inefficient operation due to the many small fields.
 
Nothing I do on the farm drinks more fuel per hour than the discbine, by a longshot. Sickle
mower doesn't pull much harder than a hay tedder and I use a bit over twice as much with
the discbine verses the tedder.
 

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