On several occasions back in the summer of 2011, Jason Meyers left his farm near Grandview, Idaho, and drove about 400 miles west to central Oregon. His destination was Redmond, home of Newhouse Manufacturing Copany. There, Newhouse was building a sugarbeet top saver conceptualized by Meyers. The western Idaho producer envisioned supplying some of his area’s dairies with beet tops for their feed rations, thus generating additional value from his beet crop. And that’s exactly what has transpired for the past four years. "We can get anywhere from 15 to 22 tons of tops per acre," Meyers says, given beet yields typically running 40 tons/acre or higher. As of the summer of 2014, local dairies were paying him around $20 a (wet) ton for the tops. "That’s loaded in a bin, and they come and get it. If I’m trucking it to a nearby dairy, it’s $25."
That kind of economic incentive was what led Meyers to Newhouse, which has a long history of manufacturing flail shredders for various crops, straw bale choppers, mint equipment and other products. The result was Meyers’ 12-row top saver that operated for the first time during the 2011 sugarbeet harvest. Nine-inch cupped flails, rotating at just under 1,000 rpm, gather the foliage, feeding it up onto dual belt conveyors that can discharge from either side. While the unit can windrow the tops onto adjacent harvested rows, it also features a 16-foot elevator that, when lowered into place, will convey the tops up into an accompanying forage truck or cart. Two-stage controls fold the elevator back up in preparing the 24-foot-wide top saver for highway transport. "It takes us about 30 minutes to fully change it over to tongue pull," Meyers relates. Field speed for the top saver is typically between 5.5 to 6.0 mph. "It will ‘outrun’ any harvester we have in the field," Meyers says. A few inches of green remain on the roots, however, so a defoliator pass is still needed before the beets are lifted. Newhouse also fabricated a straw bale chopper-blower, and straw is added to the beet tops after they’ve been hauled to the dairy. "The reason we chop straw is to help it absorb the tops’ moisture since they’re so high in moisture," he explains. "We can load several ton bales; they’ll slowly feed while it blows and chops the straw. The blower pulverizes the straw, blowing it in to a pile. Then we dump in the beet tops, they get mixed with the straw, and it’s all packed into a pit." Barley straw works very well, Meyers says, but he also tried some bean chaff in 2014. "Cows love bean chaff, but it has a lot of dirt in it. So I’ve started to swath my beans instead to keep the dirt out." Meyers also uses the top saver to windrow corn stalks. "I can speed up the drum to where it just pulverizes those stalks," he notes. With area corn commonly yielding between 250 to 300 bushels/acre, "we can have residue issues when beets follow corn," he says. "So we need to get rid of some of the stalks. We can raise up the Newhouse shredder, windrow them — but not take off too much if we have erosion concerns. If we don’t have an erosion problem, we’ll lower the unit down, and it will ‘slick up’ the stalks to where you can hardly tell there was a corn crop there." Dairies in the area currently are paying around $35-40 a ton for the corn stalks. — Don Lilleboe
