MENSCHEN TITLE RUBRIK
MENSCHEN TITLE RUBRIK THEME The straw harvest in Denmark POTENT PACKING PO 6
The Danish agricultural contracting company Halm 80 specialises in harvesting straw. Its seven balers pack 60,000 big rectangular bales per season for production of electricity and heat as well as for export. Farmer and contractor Christopher Jensen studied agriculture and runs a farm near Nyborg on the Danish island of Fünen. Alongside the arable farming enterprise, contract straw baling was started in the 1980s. The resultant firm, Halm 80, nowadays lifts and packages straw within a radius of 50 km and, on the east of Fünen, also buys straw on the field for baling. Additionally, Christopher Jensen manages 700 ha of arable in cooperation with a neighbouring farmer. Their crop work is split, with Christopher Jensen responsible for all drilling and spraying work. What is hardly imaginable for German contractors has been carried out for a long time by Halm 80: “For years now, we’ve been working with just one tractor of our own, a machine that also works on the arable farm right through the year. For the straw harvest, we lease new and powerful tractors with between 250 and 300 HP,” reports Christopher Jensen. These eight to nine tractors each work almost 400 hours per season powering the balers. “The new large BiG Pack HDP II with front mounted straw chopper has a particularly high power requirement. In the hilly regions we cover, even a 300 HP tractor is sometimes stretched to its limit,” he says. THE 30,000st BALE Altogether, the team from Halm 80 works currently with five Krone balers, three 4x4 Highspeeds as well as a BiG Pack 1290 HDP and the already-mentioned Big Pack 1290 HDP II. Incidentally, all machines are the property of the contractor business. “We’ve invested in the balers so that at peak harvest times we have the capacity to bale large amounts and be independent,” says Christopher Jensen, adding: “A good baler lasts with us as long as five or six years. For example, one of the 4x4 Highspeeds produced its 30,000st bale this summer in its fifth season.” WER Currently, difficult conditions – for example low milk prices – in Denmark mean livestock farms tend to leave their fieldwork to contractors. “We see that sales of smaller machines tend to be lower compared with sales of larger ones because smaller-scale farmers tend to find it more efficient to invest very little in machinery: A trend 7
