Question for real farmers who use them - as the title says, why can't a forage harvester pull it's own trailer?
I assume it's because IRL there are very few one man farms around so you'll always have a mate to drive a tractor and trailer to collect the chaff, but in game it's a pain in the backside and the Fliegl Bull trailer by TopAce888 is a godsend!
Yep, granted that barely qualifies as a SP. (in both capacity and the fact it can’t throw silage far)
And Big Tractor Power on YouTube has some videos of John Deere 8600 choppers pulling silage boxes opening up fields (where tractors can’t follow on the sides) but the tractor for that wagon and others were following. It’s just faster to not stop to hook and unhook and a decent SP has enough capacity that you need many people hauling.
Some contractors still do it here, but reversing or following behind the chopper is more common and time efficient. This is a video we made back in 2018 (chopper appears at about 2:10) :
About 30 - 40 years ago many contractors here had a bunker harvester in use, machines like the Hesston Field Queen or the 7730 and no need to pull or follow with a trailer.
The fact of the matter is todays choppers are designed to cut a bigger swath than in the past which results in fast loading times. Its just much faster to have a truck or trailer pull alongside than spend a lot of time hooking and unhooking trailers.
If it is done right, having the chopper pull the trailer itself can be (almost) as efficient as having a truck or a tractor with a trailer pulling alongside: https://youtu.be/b7nNr6MxaEE?t=566
On that video a wagon switch starts about 15:22 (stops driving and unhooks), and ends about 17:00 (when the chopper's turned back on) which per my math is 1:38 (98sec.) which is longer than just having the spout zip back for a truck pulling up.
I love this forum, many excellent answers here. It seems to be the hooking up and unhooking taking too long so you have tractors and trailers rotating. I never use workers in game (because they are a bit rubbish) so I'm glad to see that my forage harvester plus TopAce888's Fliegl trailer is realistic, cheers Melleck.
BoxTunnel wrote: ↑Mon Jan 18, 2021 9:59 pm
Question for real farmers who use them - as the title says, why can't a forage harvester pull it's own trailer?
I assume it's because IRL there are very few one man farms around so you'll always have a mate to drive a tractor and trailer to collect the chaff, but in game it's a pain in the backside and the Fliegl Bull trailer by TopAce888 is a godsend!
We could, but we don't get that technical with our harvester. We run semis+36ft trailers and tractors+silage wagons, and with 3 semis and a few trucks, we're able to keep up with the chopper up to 5 miles away. From an inference, it sounds the difference between this style of chopping, and the method more commonly found in Europe of having a container on the forager, is because it's better to have the forager filling constantly since if you get too many tractors in the field/roads/silage clamp, then it becomes crowded. But I could be completely wrong, that's just me thinking out loud