22 September 2011

Grape harvest

I would like to show you a few pictures and a video so you can see something about grape harvest tasks. In my area there are few vineyards, therefore these tasks are almost missing. I can remember when I was a child and my parents harvested grapes manually... nowadays people continue harvesting grapes manually if the vineyard is not prepared for harvesting grapes with the automatic system. Harvesting grapes is very common in September, especially in my area (in other Spanish areas and with other varieties of grape the harvesting can be doing in August). As I told you in previous posts, we don't have vineyards and I am not a expert about that.

We were with our cousin Enrique Lopez who was harvesting grapes in the farm where he works because we wanted to see how grape harvest machinery worked. We have never seen working this machinery before. I think The Pellenc 3050 gets grapes very clean and any grapes are lost. I have to tell pulled grape harvesters work slower than propelled harvesting machines and as you can see in our video, the working speed is not very high. Thank to no mechanical  transmission, the machinery can turn 90º to the left and right. So they can work in every heads without problems.

You can watch a video from our YouTube channel.

You can see our pictures from Picasa.

















07 September 2011

Harrowing stubbles

Harrowing cereal and legumes stubbles time has started and we must prepare them for sowing. This task begins in August but it is not until September when farmers really do it. The reason is we have been waiting summer rains and other reason is we aren't allowed to use any plough, mini plough or discs harrow. Then, we only can use our chissel.

The summer is being very dry this year ( it has not rained from June), as a result the soil is very compact and if we have a large working deep, we create a lot of enormous clods and the tractor has to do a strong work, so we have an increment in diesel consumption. Another important problem is dust, because we must clean the filters every day if we want our tractor works very fine.

Regarding our pictures, we are using  our chissel with 11 rows (40x30mm). We used our Gil cultichissel with 15 rows but the soil is so hard we didn't get a good work. With this chissel, the Agrotron 85 works successfully and the stubble is completely broken although the working speed is not too huge (about 6,7 km/h).

You can see our pictures from Picasa.

You can watch a video about harrowing stubble from here: Video