Twin wheels to make a comeback?

Twin wheels have been, at one time, all the trend with tillage farmers, because the appreciation grew that the growing weight of ever extra highly effective tractors was beginning to harm the soil construction.

The tractor producers responded with larger wheels and bigger tyres which rendered the becoming of duals an pointless hassle; OEM gadgets have been additionally much less prone to sheer the wheel studs off.

Renewed curiosity

Now the Danish tyre distributor NDI, in partnership with SEGES, a industrial analysis firm, is to match excessive flexion (VF) tyres fitted to twin wheels working between rows with vast LGP tyres working on prime of the rows.

Dual HF tyres — 4 slender VF tyres working between the rows whereas drilling maize

That is the second trial run by the businesses; final 12 months they in contrast the impact of spreading fertiliser with commonplace or VF tyres fitted to the tractor. The end result was a €32/ha enhance in margin in favour of the latter.

Inspired by the obvious advantage of excessive flexion tyres, manufactured by Alliance, this 12 months’s trial seeks to ascertain if the bottom strain exerted by a typical slender tyre could be compensated for, by means of the usage of the newest tyre expertise.

Contact patch is essential

A regular slender tyre will exert a big down pressure by means of its contact patch. Nevertheless, a VF tyre will ‘squab’ each laterally and longitudinally, drastically growing its contact space with the soil and so cut back floor strain.

soil VF tyres SEGES — The 4 tyres solely run on the strip of the soil between rows

By utilizing two slender VF tyres per wheel, with an acceptable house between them, it’s supposed that no weight be positioned immediately upon the sown strip of floor, whereas, on the identical time, lowering harm to the soil between the rows that the tyres are working on.

soil LGP tyres crop rows — Broad LGP tyres run on the bottom the place the crop is to develop, however at a low floor strain

To create a typical to which the outcomes could be in contrast, a second set of vast LGP tyres was fitted to the tractor which then ran on prime of the rows, albeit at a a lot diminished floor strain.

Autumn evaluation

The experiment was run in the course of the sowing operation and there’ll comply with visits by SEGES to evaluate the expansion and high quality of the crops.

As soon as the crop is harvested, the information might be analysed to substantiate, in some way, the importance of utilizing VF duals quite than LGP tyres.

LGP tyres soil ND! — The LGP tyres have been additionally run as duals on the rear of the tractor

An analogous experiment has been run in Germany which did present there was some profit to this arrange, nonetheless, NDI needs to make sure that the identical applies in Danish situations.