Efficiency in Action Our Custom Fluffer Tedder

Efficiency in Action: Our Custom Fluffer/Tedder

Our fluffer/tedder is a machine we are quite proud of and a huge reason we think we make better hay than our competitors.

After several years of experimenting with different fluffer designs, we took our prototype to a custom agriculture equipment manufacturer and had them improve the engineering and design a unit that would fluff three swaths (39’) at a time. The manufacturer has since built a few more of these machines, of which we get a royalty from.

Our fluffer/tedder is self-propelled, which is previously unheard of and offers a huge advantage over other tedders. It has three sections which means it does the work of three typical machines at one time – lifting and fluff the hay and setting it back down.

This may sound very simple, but our fluffer/tedder is designed to cause the hay to dry much quicker. It saves us a whole day in the hay making process, allowing us to bale one day sooner than we could before.

Many times, a four-day window to make hay becomes a three-day window because of a change in the weather forecast. By fluffing the hay, we are able to speed up the drying and beat the rain.

Hay that gets rained on before being baled, drops in value considerably in a matter of a couple hours due to rain damage. The economic damage doesn’t stop there either, as now it will take several more trips with equipment across the field to get the hay dried back out. All this equipment traffic damages the next cutting which is already starting to grow. This adds up very quickly.

Our fluffer/tedder is also much gentler on the hay than typical tedders. Good quality hay still has lots of leaves. If the hay is handled aggressively by inferior equipment, it experiences more leaf loss.

The haybine lays out the windrows with a gap in between each swath. After the fluffer/tedder goes through the field, the gaps are still there. As the hay dries, the ground in between the windrows also dries. When the hay is raked, two windrows come together and are placed on dry ground which again helps with the drying process.

Our fluffer/tedder sets the hay right back down where it was, so that the windrows remain intact. Most other tedders just scatter the hay across the whole field without leaving a dry area to rake the windrow onto.

Innovations like our fluffer/tedder allow us to deliver a superior end product to our customers.