Tanco may have been the first to bring out a baler with an integral wrapper, but grassland giant Kverneland – more precisely, its daughter Taarup – is hot on the Irish upstart’s heals. Early this year Mick Roberts travelled to Norway, to not only find out more about this new development but also see it working!
One of the many riddles of the machinery trade: Why is it so much like a bus service? Wait ages for one development to come along, and then another follows in close behind. And that’s just what’s happened in the baler/wrapper arena. Just months after Irish firm Tanco showed the first commercial baler with an integral wrapper, Taarup – part of the Norway-based multinational Kverneland – launches a rival: The BIO or Bale-In-One machine.
But it’s not so surprising. Indeed, a baler with an integral wrapper makes so much sense that it is more amazing that it’s taken so long for just the two ideas to be introduced. The big development difficulty, according to the designers, is output. While farmers and contractors dearly want to combine baling and wrapping into one operation, they are unwilling to sacrifice baler capacity to obtain this, until recently, almost mythical machine.
The challenge is to combine the two operations without compromising baler output. Taarup says its BIO will produce up to 45 bales/hr, but a more realistic output is about 30 wrapped bales/hr. Key to capacity is film application. This is the greatest difficulty facing integral wrapper designers, because to release the bale the chamber needs to be able to split whilst still allowing film dispensers to rotate around the bale unimpeded.
