We're here today to talk to you about a New Holland pull type forage harvester. The one we have here is a New Holland FP230. We want to talk about is what customers use a pull type forage harvester. Some people think it's a dying industry, because of the self propelled machines and the capabilities of them.
But we're here to show you and tell you that that's not the case. The real key about a pull type forage harvester for your smaller capacity farmers, your small dairies, some of your beef cattle guys, is to being able to cut the forage when it is ready to be harvested for the food value. Not to have to wait for a custom operator to come in and cut it, be a day late and lose your nutrition value.
There's very key to being able to cut your harvest and your crop exactly when you want to. This machine, the way it's set up here, it's set up for corn. It has a three row corn head on. Our corn is taken here in rows, 30 inch rows. They way this is set up, it is cut off by the knife down here, which is two rotating disks. Picked up by the gathering chain. Cycled up into the auger and into our throat.
Our throat on this is an opening of 22 inches to accept material into a large 21 inch cutter drum diameter. In the back it has knives. It comes with 12 knives. You can take them out. You can do an eight knife for a longer cut. Six knife for even longer. Adjust the length of cut, depending on what your nutritionist will want you to have for your cattle. When our product comes off our head into our feed rolls, New Holland has a unit called Metal Alert 3.
The metal alert picks up any metal that would be in the crop or material that would get into the knife and hurt our cutter drum and the knife. How that works is, there is a metal alert rolling underneath here. When it detects the metal, it hits a clutch that shuts off the feed roll. That is instantaneous. Then you can reverse the feed roll, take the material out. Get in there, feed it out. Get it out of the field and then continue harvesting.
Our harvester here is equipped with a sharpening stone. When we're running the cutter head in reverse, we pull on our 'T' handle here. It cycles it across the knife and back. You're listening for it ticking against the shear bar to get a nice sharp edge on our knife. As the crop comes through the feed roll and through the knife section, we come into what we call- for doing corn, which we're in the fall time of year, which we're doing, we go through a processor. It's two sets of steel rolls that are designed to grind up the corn kernel so it's more digestible by the cattle. If we leave whole kernel it just passes through and we don't get all the nutrition we need.
By grinding up the kernel and the cob, we're able to use all the feed value of the corn. It's what we're after. It comes through the processor, into our transfer auger, over to our blower, up or spout and into the wagon. Kind of a basic, very simple process. It's been this way for the last 50 years, but a very efficient one at that. As our material enters the blower, there's a series of paddles in here that are going to force the material up the spout and out.
The spout you can control left or right to fill your wagon. You also have a deflector on the top that would let you point it to the back of the wagon or the front of the wagon. You can get a full load when you unhook and hook up to your next wagon. That's just done off the hitch here at the back of the harvester. As we look at pool type forage harvesters, there's a real specific market for them.
It's going to be for our low acreage, smaller dairies and smaller beef cattle operations. Wouldn't be designed for any large capacity operations with only being able to harvest three rows of corn and seven foot wide hay pick up head. It isn't be something that our large capacity customers will be looking for. It's specifically designed for those smaller acreage customers. If you're interested in a machine like this, or anything else needing parts or service, please feel free to contact us at 1-800-222-3373 or visit us at messicks.com. Thank you.
