Sudangrass greenchop yields reduced by wheel damage during harvesting

Greenchopping forage requires the frequent use of heavy equipment including tractors, choppers, and bank-out wagons—operating in fields that may vary from rather dry to quite wet. Such equipment may weigh from 16,000 lbs empty to nearly 25,000 lbs loaded, and this weight is unequally distributed among many wheels. The width of cut of the chopper, the axle widths of all units, and the positions of hitches determine the area of stubble run over by the wheels in successive rounds during field harvesting. Tests with typical greenchop equipment indicated that up to 80 per cent of the ground area was run over by wheels. Some wheels exactly track the preceding wheels and others partially cover areas run over in previous harvest rounds— thus there is no uniform wheel load treatment applied to the crop stubble or ground surface.