A hay rake is an agricultural rake used to collect cut hay or straw into windrows for later collection (e.g. by a baler or a loader wagon). It is also designed to fluff up the hay and turn it over so that it may dry. It is also used in the evening to protect the hay from morning dew. The next day a tedder is used to spread it again, so that the hay dries more quickly.
A hay rake may be mechanized, drawn by a tractor or draft animals, or it may be a hand tool. The earliest hay rakes were nothing more than tree branches, but wooden hand rakes with wooden teeth, similar in design to a garden rake but larger, were prevalent in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and still are used in some locations around the world. Hay rakes were among the first agricultural tools to become popular in the shift from human manual labor to animal labor in the 19th century. [1]
The typical early horse-drawn hay rake was a dump rake, a wide two-wheeled implement with curved steel or iron teeth usually operated from a seat mounted over the rake with a lever-operated lifting mechanism. This rake gathered cut hay into windrows by repeated operation perpendicular to the windrow, requiring the operator to raise the rake, turn around and drop the teeth to rake back and forth in order to form the windrow. In some areas, a sweep rake, which could also be a horse-drawn or tractor-mounted implement, could then be used to pick up the windrowed hay and load it onto a wagon.
Later, a mechanically more complicated rake was developed, known as the side delivery rake. This usually had a gear-driven or chain-driven reel mounted roughly at a 45-degree angle to the windrow, so the hay was gathered and pushed to one side of the rake as it moved across the field. A side delivery rake could be pulled longitudinally along the windrow by horses or a tractor, eliminating the laborious and inefficient process of raising, lowering, and back-and-forth raking required by a dump rake. This allowed for the continuous spiraling windrows of a classic mid-20th-century farm hayfield. Later versions of the side delivery rake used a more severe transverse angle and a higher frame system, but the basic principles of operation were the same.
Still later, a variety of wheel rakes or star wheel rakes were developed, with 5, 6, 7 or more spring-tooth encircled wheels mounted on a frame and ground driven by free-wheeling contact as the implement was pulled forward. These rakes were variously promoted as being mechanically simpler and trouble-free, gentler on the hay than a side-delivery rake, and cheaper to operate.
Currently a newer design called the rotary rake is in common use in Europe, and less frequently seen in the United States and Canada.
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.
A tractor is an engineering vehicle specifically designed to deliver a high tractive effort at slow speeds, for the purposes of hauling a trailer or machinery such as that used in agriculture, mining or construction. Most commonly, the term is used to describe a farm vehicle that provides the power and traction to mechanize agricultural tasks, especially tillage, and now many more. Agricultural implements may be towed behind or mounted on the tractor, and the tractor may also provide a source of power if the implement is mechanised.
In agriculture, a harrow is a farm implement used for surface tillage. It is used after ploughing for breaking up and smoothing out the surface of the soil. The purpose of harrowing is to break up clods and to provide a soil structure, called tilth, that is suitable for planting seeds. Coarser harrowing may also be used to remove weeds and to cover seed after sowing.
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 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 wagon or waggon is a heavy four-wheeled vehicle pulled by draught animals or on occasion by humans, used for transporting goods, commodities, agricultural materials, supplies and sometimes people.
A loader is a heavy equipment machine used in construction to move or load materials such as soil, rock, sand, demolition debris, etc. into or onto another type of machinery.
Heavy equipment, heavy machinery, earthmovers, construction vehicles, or construction equipment, refers to heavy-duty vehicles specially designed to execute construction tasks, most frequently involving earthwork operations or other large construction tasks. Heavy equipment usually comprises five equipment systems: the implement, traction, structure, power train, and control/information.
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 baler or hay baler is a piece of farm machinery used to compress a cut and raked crop into compact bales that are easy to handle, transport, and store. Often, bales are configured to dry and preserve some intrinsic value of the plants bundled. Different types of balers are commonly used, each producing a different type of bale – rectangular or cylindrical, of various sizes, bound with twine, strapping, netting, or wire.
Threshing, or thrashing, is the process of loosening the edible part of grain from the straw to which it is attached. It is the step in grain preparation after reaping. Threshing does not remove the bran from the grain.
A rake is a broom for outside use; a horticultural implement consisting of a toothed bar fixed transversely to a handle, or tines fixed to a handle, and used to collect leaves, hay, grass, etc., and in gardening, for loosening the soil, light weeding and levelling, removing dead grass from lawns, and generally for purposes performed in agriculture by the harrow.
A cultivator is a piece of agricultural equipment used for secondary tillage. One sense of the name refers to frames with teeth that pierce the soil as they are dragged through it linearly. It also refers to machines that use the rotary motion of disks or teeth to accomplish a similar result. The rotary tiller is a principal example.
A horse-drawn vehicle is a piece of equipment pulled by one or more horses. These vehicles typically have two or four wheels and were used to carry passengers or a load. They were once common worldwide, but they have mostly been replaced by automobiles and other forms of self-propelled transport but are still in use today.
The Avery Company, founded by Robert Hanneman Avery, was an American farm tractor manufacturer famed for its undermounted engine which resembled a railroad engine more than a conventional farm steam engine. Avery founded the farm implement business after the Civil War. His company built a large line of products, including steam engines, beginning in 1891. The company started with a return flue design and later adapted the undermount style, including a bulldog design on the smokebox door. Their design was well received by farmers in central Illinois. They expanded their market nationwide and overseas until the 1920s, when they failed to innovate and the company faltered. They manufactured trucks for a period of time, and then automobiles. until they finally succumbed to an agricultural crisis and the Depression.
Two-wheel tractor or walking tractor are generic terms understood in the US and in parts of Europe to represent a single-axle tractor, which is a tractor with one axle, self-powered and self-propelled, which can pull and power various farm implements such as a trailer, cultivator or harrow, a plough, or various seeders and harvesters. The operator usually walks behind it or rides the implement being towed. Similar terms are mistakenly applied to the household rotary tiller or power tiller; although these may be wheeled and/or self-propelled, they are not tailored for towing implements. A two-wheeled tractor specializes in pulling any of numerous types of implements, whereas rotary tillers specialize in soil tillage with their dedicated digging tools. This article concerns two-wheeled tractors as distinguished from such tillers.
A tedder is a machine used in haymaking. It is used after cutting and before windrowing, and uses moving forks to aerate or "wuffle" the hay and thus speed drying before baling or rolling. The use of a tedder allows the hay to dry ("cure") better, which prevents mildew or fermentation.
A stone picker is an implement to sieve through the top layer of soil to separate and collect rocks and soil debris from good topsoil. It is usually tractor-pulled. A stone picker is similar in function to a rock windrower ; a stone picker generally digs to greater depths to remove stones and rocks.
The GE Elec-Trak was the first commercially produced all-electric garden tractor, made mostly between 1969 and 1975 at GE's Outdoor Power Equipment Operation under Bruce R. Laumeister. The previous work of Laumeister at GE on the experimental Delta electric car that debuted in 1968 helped pave the way for the production of the Elec-Trak. Despite the limited production and availability of the electric tractors, many Elec-Traks are still in use today and have a cult following among tractor and electric vehicle enthusiasts. They are an archetypal or seminal design that has influenced all later electric tractors.