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We had that problem with our 489s in tall hay too. If you watch closely, you'll see the rolls grab and start pulling the crop through before the stems get to the cutterbar. The problem doesn't occur in normal conditions because the reel sweeps the crop into the rollers after it's cut off, or as it's being cut. When the hay is too tall, it's being torn off or pulled out of the ground by the conditioning rolls. The hay also tended to start wrapping around one of the rollers first. We switched to disc mower-conditioners and don't have any more problems with tall, wet or heavy crops. There's no reel to push the crop into the rolls (or impeller), so the conditioner can't get ahead of the knives. Actually, the flap at the front of the mower hood bends the crop forward some, so the knives get to the crop before the conditioner. We had no trouble with the disc+roller mo-co, but now have the disc+impeller and really like the flexibility the impeller offers. Our fix for the 489 'high-crop' problem was to back the roll pressure off a lot. Then we'd pry the top roll up and insert a small piece of steel, square tubing under each end of the roller (where it rests on stops). With the blocks in place, we'd crank the roller pressure up a little bit to make sure it would hold them tightly. The result was about a 1-2" gap between the rollers. The conditioner was pretty much disabled as a result, but it would still crush the hay some (simply because the crop was so thick) and prevented the rollers from grabbing onto the crop before it was cut. No clogging or wrapping problems in really tall hay, and we only lost a couple of the blocks in all the times we did it.
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