Hay is grass, legumes, or other herbaceous plants that have been cut and dried to be stored for use as animal fodder, either for large grazing animals raised as livestock, such as cattle, horses, goats, and sheep, or for smaller domesticated animals such as rabbits and guinea pigs. Pigs can eat hay, but do not digest it as efficiently as herbivores do.
Alfalfa, also called lucerne, is a perennial flowering plant in the legume family Fabaceae. It is cultivated as an important forage crop in many countries around the world. It is used for grazing, hay, and silage, as well as a green manure and cover crop. The name alfalfa is used in North America. The name lucerne is more commonly used in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. The plant superficially resembles clover, especially while young, when trifoliate leaves comprising round leaflets predominate. Later in maturity, leaflets are elongated. It has clusters of small purple flowers followed by fruits spiralled in 2 to 3 turns containing 10–20 seeds. Alfalfa is native to warmer temperate climates. It has been cultivated as livestock fodder since at least the era of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
A scythe is an agricultural hand tool for mowing grass or harvesting crops. It is historically used to cut down or reap edible grains, before the process of threshing. The scythe has been largely replaced by horse-drawn and then tractor machinery, but is still used in some areas of Europe and Asia. Reapers are bladed machines that automate the cutting of the scythe, and sometimes subsequent steps in preparing the grain or the straw or hay.
The modern combine harvester, or simply combine, is a machine designed to harvest a variety of grain crops. The name derives from its combining four separate harvesting operations—reaping, threshing, gathering, and winnowing—to a single process. Among the crops harvested with a combine are wheat, rice, oats, rye, barley, corn (maize), sorghum, millet, soybeans, flax (linseed), sunflowers and rapeseed. The separated straw, left lying on the field, comprises the stems and any remaining leaves of the crop with limited nutrients left in it: the straw is then either chopped, spread on the field and ploughed back in or baled for bedding and limited-feed for livestock.
A lawn mower is a device utilizing one or more revolving blades to cut a grass surface to an even height. The height of the cut grass may be fixed by the design of the mower but generally is adjustable by the operator, typically by a single master lever or by a mechanism on each of the machine's wheels. The blades may be powered by manual force, with wheels mechanically connected to the cutting blades so that the blades spin when the mower is pushed forward, or the machine may have a battery-powered or plug-in electric motor. The most common self-contained power source for lawn mowers is a small internal combustion engine. Smaller mowers often lack any form of self-propulsion, requiring human power to move over a surface; "walk-behind" mowers are self-propelled, requiring a human only to walk behind and guide them. Larger lawn mowers are usually either self-propelled "walk-behind" types or, more often, are "ride-on" mowers that the operator can sit on and control. A robotic lawn mower is designed to operate either entirely on its own or less commonly by an operator on a remote control.
A reaper is a farm implement or person that reaps crops at harvest when they are ripe. Usually the crop involved is a cereal grass. The first documented reaping machines were Gallic reapers that were used in Roman times in what would become modern-day France. The Gallic reaper involved a comb which collected the heads, with an operator knocking the grain into a box for later threshing.
A mower is a person or machine that cuts (mows) grass or other plants that grow on the ground. Usually mowing is distinguished from reaping, which uses similar implements, but is the traditional term for harvesting grain crops, e.g. with reapers and combines.
A sickle, bagging hook, reaping-hook or grasshook is a single-handed agricultural tool designed with variously curved blades and typically used for harvesting or reaping grain crops, or cutting succulent forage chiefly for feeding livestock. Falx was a synonym but was later used to mean any of a number of tools that had a curved blade that was sharp on the inside edge such as a scythe.
In mechanical or automotive engineering, a freewheel or overrunning clutch is a device in a transmission that disengages the driveshaft from the driven shaft when the driven shaft rotates faster than the driveshaft. An overdrive is sometimes mistakenly called a freewheel, but is otherwise unrelated.
A forage harvester – also known as a silage harvester, forager or chopper – is a farm implement that harvests forage plants to make silage. Silage is grass, corn or hay, which has been chopped into small pieces, and compacted together in a storage silo, silage bunker, or in silage bags. It is then fermented to provide feed for livestock. Haylage is a similar process to silage but using grass which has dried.
A swather, or windrower, is a farm implement that cuts hay or small grain crops and forms them into a windrow for drying.
Continuous casting, also called strand casting, is the process whereby molten metal is solidified into a "semifinished" billet, bloom, or slab for subsequent rolling in the finishing mills. Prior to the introduction of continuous casting in the 1950s, steel was poured into stationary molds to form ingots. Since then, "continuous casting" has evolved to achieve improved yield, quality, productivity and cost efficiency. It allows lower-cost production of metal sections with better quality, due to the inherently lower costs of continuous, standardised production of a product, as well as providing increased control over the process through automation. This process is used most frequently to cast steel. Aluminium and copper are also continuously cast.
A hedge trimmer, shrub trimmer, or bush trimmer is a gardening tool or machine used for trimming hedges or solitary shrubs (bushes). Different designs as well as manual and powered versions of hedge trimmers exist. Hedge trimmers vary between small hand-held devices to larger trimmers mounted on tractors.
The Claas Cougar is a self-propelled mower produced by the German agricultural machinery manufacturer Claas. The mower, which is named after the cougar, a large American cat, was first presented in 2003. Due to its maximum cutting width of 14 metres (46 ft) it is classified as the largest self-propelled mower in the world.
A flail mower is a type of powered garden/agricultural equipment which is used to deal with heavier grass/scrub which a normal lawn mower could not cope with. Some smaller models are self-powered, but many are PTO driven implements, which can attach to the three-point hitches found on the rear of most tractors. This type of mower is best used to provide a rough cut to long grass and even brambles in locations such as roadsides, where contact with loose debris may be possible.
Brown Bayley Steels was a steel-making company established in Sheffield, England in 1871, as Brown, Bayley & Dixon. They occupied a site on Leeds Road which was later occupied by the Don Valley sports stadium. The firm was founded by George Brown, Nephew of "John Brown" of the firm John Brown & Company. The firm manufactured Bessemer steel and railway tracks.
A rotary mower is a unit of powered machinery that uses a rotating blade or blades to cut vegetation.
A drum motor is a geared motor drive enclosed within a steel shell providing a single component driving pulley for conveyor belts.
A brushcutter is a powered garden or agricultural tool used to trim weeds, small trees, and other foliage not accessible by a lawn mower or rotary mower. Various blades or trimmer heads can be attached to the machine for specific applications.
