Sugar Beet Weeding Almost Completed

Kombinat Rolny Kietrz, a Polish company near the Czech border, now uses a BEDNAR ROW-MASTER RN 12 000 S inter-row cultivator with a width of 12 metres. In aggregation with a John Deere tractor, they have been weeding 1,500 hectares of sugar beet since spring. Continue reading for more information about the company as well as weeding.

Kombinat Rolny Kietrz

Kombinat Rolny Kietrz is one of the largest and most prosperous farms in Poland, and also the largest producer of sugar beet in the European Union. In addition, it is the most important employer in the region as it provides work for more than 300 employees. The company manages an area of 9,000 hectares near the border with the Czech Republic. In their fields they grow winter wheat, oilseed rape, sugar beet, corn and other crops. In addition to plant production they are also engaged in animal production. The farm breeds about 9,000 cattle, out of which about 3,500 are dairy cows.

ROW-MASTER RN_S is designed for precise inter-row loosening and elimination of weeds and weed beets.

The weeder disturbs the soil crust, bringing more air to the sugar beet crop.

We should mention their technical fleet that they regularly invest in. They own 126 tractors, out of which there are 40 John Deere tractors of various models and 16 JCB Fastrack machines. Their diverse fleet also includes the ROW-MASTER RN 12 000 S inter-row cultivator, which they use for weeding sugar beet. The company produces about 39 million litres of milk annually and they are able to store approximately 70,000 tonnes of various crops in their central warehouses. The company also operates two power plants and a petrol station where anyone can fill up their vehicles.

The frame clearance of the inter-row cultivator is 42 cm.

A working width of 12 metres manages to weed 24 rows in a single pass.

The weeder also works with older tractor types

The technology that Kombinat Rolny Kietrz owns is both modern and also aged. The 24-row weeder ROW-MASTER RN 12 000 S with a width of 12 metres by BEDNAR is aggregated with a John Deere 7810 tractor. They use the CultiCam optical guiding system which guides the weeder starting with two true leaves of the sugar beet.

This year’s inter-row cultivation at the farm

The farm is currently weeding an area of 1,650 hectares of corn and 1,500 hectares of sugar beet. Considering this year’s weather, they have not managed to weed all the sugar beet crops during May when it rained a lot. Today, the sugar beet is already large and so the farm chose a strategy of morning weeding, which starts at the break of day at 4 a.m.

The CultiCam precise optical guidance manages to guide starting with two true leaves.

Weeding a 200hectare field near the town of Kietrz.

There are several reasons for morning weeding, the main one being that sugar beet closes its leaves for the night and as soon as the temperature rises the leaves drop to the ground, which worsens the conditions for weeding. Another reason is the pleasant morning temperature for the machine operator.

Process of weeding

When we arrived at the company, we set off to a 200 hectare field with the ROW-MASTER RN 12 000 S cultivator and its operator. When we arrived at the field, the operator immediately unfolded the weeder where he finished the day before and guided the machine to the sugar beet rows using CultiCam. The sensor immediately recognised the crop and weeding could start.

ROW-MASTER RN_S has a maintenance-free parallelogram hinge for working units.

A weeded row of sugar beet.

The weeder, equipped with share working sections with flexi-tines set to a working depth of 6 cm, started to evenly remove the soil crust in all 24 rows at a speed of 9 km/hour, aerating soil and removing the weeds.

Ing. Zdeněk Souhrada, BEDNAR FMT s.r.o. [email protected] Marketing Specialist

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