German company Krone invited more than 130 international agricultural journalists to see the prototype of the Premos 5000 in action recently.
Speaking at the event, Krone’s Niklow Beindorf said that the machine had the potential to change the way that farmers
dealt with straw. The Krone Premos 5000 is the world’s first mobile pellet harvester.
It produces pellets as it picks up windrowed hay or straw directly from the swathe left by the harvester. In doing so, it eliminates the entire baling, bale collecting and transport chain.
The material is picked up by the 2,35m-wide reel and fed to an 800mm-wide conveyor belt. The belt feeds the material through two rollers (800mm x 800mm) that act as ring dies with rows of teeth alternating with rows of holes. The rollers press the material into the holes and the 16mm-diameter extrusion moulds.
An auger feeds the finished pellets to a conveyor belt that takes them to a hopper at the rear of the machine. This eliminates energy-intensive pre-treatment such as chopping or milling; in fact, the energy demand is half of that required by conventional stationary pelleting systems.
The pellets are discharged from the hopper by a conveyor to a trailer for transport to the end-user.
The Premos has a hopper capacity of 5 000kg (up to 9m³) and an output of up to 5 000kg/h, three to five times the output of most current pelleting systems. With the addition of a bale splitter, the Premos 5000 can be employed outside the harvest season as a stationary pelleter. The bale splitter folds up into a vertical position for transport.
Joe Spencer is the mechanisation editor of Farmer’s Weekly.
