topliner

Last year saw a major revamp of the SsangYong Musso and an upgrade to Mitsubishi’s L200. The Musso gained new underpinnings and a fresh interior from the company’s Rexton SUV, along with a seven-year, 150,000-mile warranty. Meanwhile a stronger rear frame lifted the L200’s towing capacity to 3.5t, although this applies only when pulling a tri-axle braked trailer; otherwise the limit stays at 3.1t.

North American arable farmers are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit seasonal tractor drivers for a few hundred hours of harvest chaser bin work. But help is now at hand in the form of plug-and-play driverless technology called AutoCart, which is believed to be the first time a farmer can take a tractor, make it driverless, and then with the flick of a switch drive it like a normal tractor.

With the addition of the Disco Move, Claas has added two new models to its front-mounted mower range if you count both the 3200 (3.0m) and wider working 3600 (3.4m) although the latter is not offered in the UK or Ireland. The 3200 is available in FC (tine conditioner) and F (no conditioner) variants.

Understanding the importance of reliable lime application has prompted the father and son team of Noel and Richard Kane to make their own machine. And the long-term plan is to develop a range under the SpreadPoint banner. Farming over 400ha of arable crops, it was not just the demand for a machine that initiated this project but also the opportunity to keep their farm staff busy in the quieter month.

Tractor Mother Regulations (see profi 01/2018) caused a right old hoo-ha at the beginning of last year and, for the most part, there were very few changes that actually benefitted the user. One item that did is a new option to decelerate a tractor without tapping the brake pedal.

For the past two years, Farb Guidance Systems has quietly run six Cat 299D skid steers in the Pacific North West, and it reckons to have logged over 2,000 hours of operation and covered around 8,000ha (20,000 acres) of mainly wheat, OSR and potato land. We caught up with three of the six machines, along with company president and founder Dave Farb, in a field in Iowa for a demo of these unusual vehicles.

Steel wheels, Sage Green finish, electronic power steering, revised engine braking system, steel racks front and rear, a sealed battery and a variable speed limiter. In broad outline, these are the key standard features Polaris offers on its Sportsman 570 EPS Agri Pro Special Edition, EU T3b homologation as a tractor adding extra utility. Fit a rear number plate and register it for farm use and it is road ready. What the Agri Pro package does not get you is a price inflating front winch, ADC (Active Descent Control) or alloy wheels.

If you’re looking to play safe and go with the UK mainstream, you’ll struggle to pick a couple of more popular mid-sized 4x4s than the Land Rover Discovery Sport and Volvo’s XC60. They’re literally everywhere. Sadly, however, 'in the mainstream' doesn’t necessarily equate to low cost, with both of these in their tested form leaving little change, if any, out of £50,000. Granted, there’s clearly the option to head down the nearly-new route or settle for a lower-spec 2WD variant — the Discovery Sport starts at around £31,500, the XC60 £39,000 — whereas, if on an even bigger budget, you can load up with extras and inflate the final onroad bill to north of £60,000.

New features include automatic, GPSbased field detection, creating job reports in PDF format, help windows and multi-layer application maps for variable-rate spraying of various products. Also the GPS-Track feature was improved so operators can now nudge waylines that have shifted due to GPS drift by pressing a single button  just as they could on the AmaTron 3. The latter wasn't possible on the early AmaTron 4 we operated in the UX 4201 Super.

Drought-baked, impenetrable heavy land in 2019 proved a real challenge for short disc harrows. Köckerling’s solution is a more aggressive disc system for the Rebell, which will be particularly appealing to those on heavy soils. Last summer we had the opportunity to use one of the first four prototypes in wheat stubble ... to see what the changes bring to the cultivation party. This is the first time Köckerling has abandoned its traditional leaf spring disc protection and replaced it with a coil spring design. These springs are tensioned to absorb up to 200kg, which should help the Rebell Classic to penetrate to a uniform depth.