Mechanical hay-bale unrolling world record set in NZ

The world record for the highest number of round hay bales unrolled in eight hours has been claimed. See how it went down.

Working on a 1400-hectare dairy farm in central New Zealand, the new Combi RX218 wagon, designed and built by the New Zealand manufacturer Hustler Equipment, fed out an impressive 191 bales over eight non-stop hours in real farming conditions on April 29.

That is equivalent to 23.8 bales an hour, including loading and traveling, and totalled more than 134 tonnes of forage.

“We really wanted to set up this challenge on a typical hilly-country New Zealand dairy farm, travelling between paddocks, opening gates and ... feeding cows!” Hustler Equipment International Ltd chief executive Brent Currie said.

“We felt it wouldn’t be much of a challenge to just spin them out in a feedlot situation, as we wanted to prove for ourselves that the Combi RX218 is the most efficient feedout wagon on the market today.”

An impressive 191 bales were fed out over eight continuous hours. Picture: Supplied

It is claimed to be the largest amount of bales unrolled mechanically by a single machine in an eight-hour continuous period. Wrapped silage bales of lucerne were used on the day that started at 8.30am and finished at 4.30pm on the dot.

Spring Valley Farm owner Marcus Deadman and Taranaki region machinery expert and dairy farmer Jaiden Drought alternated operating the Combi RX218 towed by a Valtra T174 EV tractor while a team of farm workers loaded the wagon using a Caterpillar excavator equipped with a set of Hustler Softhands bale grab.

Two independent quantity surveyors were on site to supervise the day, during which they dutifully measured each bale and recorded the weight of every load, and even oversaw the unwinding process.

The goal was to ground feed the bales completely in long windrows, until their very dense core was unrolled completely.

Hustler wanted to set the bar high and try to tease apart roughly 95 per cent of each bale, and to then count up which bales met that standard and provide full transparency to the farmers and ranchers who would be interested in detailed results.

The surveyors created a measurement methodology and even measurement tools based on the diameter of the bales loaded versus the bale core remaining and followed along the feed out path to measure every core fed out.

Out of the 191 bales unrolled, only 21 left behind a core with a diameter larger than the qualifying 234mm.

The day went by at a steady pace, which did not dampen the good mood of the challenge team. The wagon used had also to undergo a 25-minute repair following a collision with a fence post.

“About ten more bales could have been unrolled without this incident, but it’s part of the challenge,” Gary Low and Richard Currie, from Hustler’s R&D team, said.

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