Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2025 i Profi

Speaking to various farm machinery dealers and distributors on a whistle-stop tour of Northern England, the general consensus is that the current trade can be described as 'steady'. Indeed, the feeling is much the same as it has been in recent weeks on farms, with the returning sunshine not yet giving things a jolt. Various grants have helped to get the green light for a few deals. But, while this extra incentive is nice, it’s also a double-edged sword. It means that near-new machines are pretty much devalued to below the price of a new machine less the grant. And then there is the rush to get the machines from factory to farm in the allotted time, with the ‘boom’ in sales then meaning that demand for this type of…

John Deere secured pole position in France, the largest European tractor market in 2024, and enjoyed top spot in nine other European tractor markets. The brand accounted for roughly 19,600 of the approx. 140,000 new tractors registered in Europe last year of which 11,760 (14,744 in 2023) were in the three main markets of France, Germany and Italy. The 6,059 units the brand registered in France was good for a leading 18.2% share of the total market of 33,225 units (7,179 units and a 20.1% share of the market in 2023). John Deere also held onto second place in the second most important European market of Germany, but registered 21% fewer new tractors; down from 5,899 and a 19.4% share of the market in 2023 to 4,659 and 15.9% in…

SUZUKI ATV PACK Purchasers of a new Suzuki ATV will be given a pair of branded overalls and headtorch as part of an incentive. This offer will be available until the end of August. SCOTTISH MACHINERY RING MERGER Ringlink and Highland Business Services have announced plans to merge the two cooperatives. This move is said to strengthen the two machinery rings which have a combined membership of over 4,000 and annual turnover in excess of £100 million serving farmers and crofters in an area from East-Central Scotland to Sutherland in the north, Skye and Argyll. The new enterprise will retain the Ringlink Scotland name and two directors of HBS will join the Ringlink board. Overall management will be the responsibility of Ringlink’s managing director, Graham Bruce, with the present HBS…

In our initial meet and greet driving impression in profi 4/2024, we had the chance to poke around the new-from-the-ground-up 600 Vario range. There was one stat that stuck in our mind, the 600’s wheelbase, which is 2.72m, the exact same as the now much revered 818 and 820 Vario models. But rather than having a manly six-cylinder engine under the new-style green hood, Fendt goes with a four-pot, 5.0-litre AGCO Power Core 50 motor across the four models in the 600 Vario series. In the top-of-the-range model and the tractor size we look at here, the 620, this Finnish-built engine churns out a rated output of 154kW/209hp, to which you add the 11kW/15hp ‘Dynamic Performance’ that’s denoted by the red numbering on the hood. These extra ponies are mustered…

John Deere has managed to keep it a secret for a long time … that it was coming with a new generation of self-propelled foragers. Enter the F8 and F9, which will hit the market next season. There are a number of pre-series machines operating this year, including the featured F8 600, which has been hard at work with a contractor in the north of England. As with the old models there is a distinctive split: the F8 has a 660mm wide drum, while the bigger models in the F9 are the wide body line-up with an 830mm intake. The F8 is powered by Deere’s own JD14X 13.6-litre, six-cylinder. This is the same motor that is also used in the X9 combines and the 9RX tracked tractor. In the biggest…

Five years ago, our square baler caught fire because of a defective drive shaft. I only had two fire extinguishers and three litres of water, which wasn't enough. After this I wanted a better solution and decided to build a water tank that we could fit to the tractor’s front linkage. A key part of the design for me is that it would not depend on the tractor for pumping, so if there was an issue you don’t lose water. This ensures full operational safety even in an emergency. standard off-the-shelf pressure relief valve. The tank will empty in around seven minutes through the 10m long hose with a high-pressure nozzle. It can spray the water up to about 15 metres. It only needs two of the compressed air cylinders…

In the Batch Milking (BM) system, there are ten or more robots arranged side by side, and the cows are milked in batches — just as the name suggests. This approach is looking to appeal to dairy farmers who prefer milking in groups through a parlour and are not initially wanting to go down the conventional robot route. Compared to a conventional manned parlour the benefits are that you're less dependent on skilled labour. Secondly, it eliminates the need to change the cow group sizes or feed management compared to individual milking robots. And lastly, opting for a batch milking system requires fewer modifications to your buildings. Caught on the wrong foot Batch Milking has been on the German market since 2018 — but not from DeLaval. In fact, the…

Based near Rufforth outside York, A Beckett grow 320 hectares of potatoes, and 400 hectares of combinable crops, Since Tony Beckett established the enterprise in the 1960’s he took care of spraying, as the hectares grew, his son Steve; now the head of the business took on some of the workload with a second sprayer. In the last twelve months Tony has stepped back for frontline operations, including the spraying work. This left quite the gap in crop protection capacity, which prompted Steve to look at what he could change to alleviate some of the bottleneck. The enterprise has been running Agrifac sprayers for some time, indeed, the farm’s last three machines have come from the Dutch firm, and with the field performance where the business wanted and good backup…

The humble, jack-of-all trades, loader tractor hasn't been left behind when it comes to comfort and ever more powerful hydraulics and transmission choices. Indeed, most manufacturers have two or three ranges to choose from in the 120-130hp bracket, and that power is, by and large, supplied by four-cylinder engines. We asked the various tractor manufacturers to pick out what is their best-seller in this power bracket, and they were happy to oblige. Here is a list of those tractors: ● Case IH Vestrum 130● Claas Arion 440● Deutz-Fahr 5125 GS● Fendt 312 Vario● John Deere 6M125● Kubota M6131 Utility● Massey Ferguson 5S125● McCormick X5.120 P3● New Holland T5.140 DC● Valtra G12As you will see, the vast majority of these tractors were launched around 2020, so we can probably expect to…

Being an Eighties child, I hark from an era where loading a game on to a computer, should you have been lucky enough to know someone with one, involved dragging a spool of magnetised tape past a reading head at a rate of 300 bits per second. Just to put that figure into perspective, now we can expect download speeds in excess of 150 million bits per second, through nothing but thin air, stood on a mountain. Unsurprisingly, taking advantage of this capacity, video games have become ever more realistic, sporting high-definition graphics and real-time cooperative gameplay. One such game franchise that naturally caught my eye is that of Farming Simulator. No wonder these games are data and processor hungry as the realism helps to get you invested in the…

The safe and reliable way to buy and sell machinery and equipment Wrights Farming Register offers farmers and contractors a unique service through its team of brokers. They are the ‘men in the middle’ who give an impartial opinion on the items of machinery they handle on behalf of their clients. The brokers, who currently cover an area stretching from the Scottish borders to the South Coast, can save farmers time and money when it comes to buying or selling anything from a combine harvester to a cattle trough. In these security-conscious days, they also provide a discreet alternative to a public farm dispersal sale and can help farmers avoid the tax pitfalls these can cause.…

New Holland has refreshed the exterior styling and increased the output of the FPT powerplant in its Brazilian-built T8 tractors. Upgraded engine software increases the output from the FPT Cursor 9 engine in the revised six-model line-up (T8.320, T8.350, T8.380, T8.410, T8.430 and T8.440) by 5hp-15hp. South America does not have Europe’s strict engine emission regulations, and the flagship in the new range is the only model with an SCR system. The three smaller models have the Ultra Command 18f×4r full powershift, while the T8.410, T8.430 and T8.440 use the new Ultra Command 21fx5r box, which has a break-to-clutch function. The hydraulics have been tweaked and the latest T8s have LED headlights, ISObus and PLM Intelligence. The T8 for the South American markets is made at the CNH plant at…

Approx 6.5% fewer new (50hp+) tractors were registered in mainland Europe in 2024 and a total just under 140,000 units. Spain, Portugal and Belgium bucked the trend, but registrations were down in all other countries, including the big three markets of France, Germany and Italy. France remains the most important market, accounting for 33,225 (-6.8%) units. There was a -3.4% drop in the second largest market of Germany (29,315), and despite the 12.3% dip in the numbers, Italy held on to third spot with 15,448 units (17,613 in 2023). When lumped together, these three markets accounted for 77,988 of total (83,623 in 2023) registrations in mainland Europe last year. The Polish tractor market was another casualty, where the market fell by 17% to 8,590 units (10,311 in 2023). The biggest…

If you are going to the effort of adding a rolling tractor to the clamp, then you may as well tool it up for the job in hand. Extra ballast is one thing, but then a clamp roller notches up the consolidation job to another level, allowing the tractor to get across the clamp top in an efficient manner. Last year we tested the latest offering from Düvelsdorf, the aptly named Silage Roller, which has both side-shifting and over-edge rollers. Our steed for the clamping job was a Claas Axion 870 which was fitted with one dual wheel (320/105 R54) on just the right when working on grass clamps and the left dual was added when we got on to the maize harvest. The tractor’s front linkage looked after spreading…

When faced with nice and even swaths, making uniform bales is a doddle for most operators. However, these utopian rows are not the norm. Lodged and uneven crops, or like last year when wet straw had to be moved to help it dry, all have an impact on even flake thickness and in turn bale weight. And this is where New Holland’s IntelliSense automatic control system comes into play. The heart of the system is a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensor which is located on the front of the tractor cab roof. In simple terms, this sensor emits laser light beams that are reflected several metres in front of the tractor. Based on the different travel times of the light pulses, the system then calculates the position and volume…

Designed by Cheshire dairy farmer Michael Hughes, the first Spread-a-Bale saw the light of day back in 1999, with production twin-rotor SBL100 2VR models appearing a couple of years later. Designed to handle square bales of up to 1.20m x 0.90m or 1.5m round bales, a SBL100 2VR attaches to a front loader or telehandler, with the rotors spreading from the front. To load the bales, the rotors are raised on a frame so the spreader can be nosed into the bale, either at ground level or from a stack, the moving belt floor then reversed to help to draw it into the machine. To spread the bale, the rotors are lowered, the moving floor engaged to push the bale into the rotor spreading vanes. Both floor and rotors are…

It was in 1996 when Case IH took over the Austrian tractor manufacturer Steyr. Soon afterwards, the CS was introduced, based on Steyr’s M9000 series and, equally fresh-faced, larger 9105 to 9145. At the time, Steyr was largely focusing on three sizes of tractor. In Case IH lingo these were the CS Compact (35kW/48hp to 55kW/75hp) three-cylinder and the two ranges which we are focusing on here: the four mid-size CS models with a four-cylinder (57kW/78hp to 69kW/94hp) and the larger chassis four-and six-cylinder tractors (77kW/105hp to 107kW/145hp). We spoke to workshop foreman Martin Jürgensmeier as well as apprentice Marian Hermelingmeier at German, Case IH dealer Neukirch in Delbrück, who both own a CS and know the advantages and the problems. Martin Jürgensmeier bought his CS86 when it had 8,400…

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5,000-LITRE HORSCH LEEB SPRAYER Horsch has added a 5,000-litre entry-level model to its Leeb PT self-propelled sprayer range. Sitting below the 6.230/6.300 (6,000-litre) and 8.300 (8,000-litre) models, the new Leeb 5.230 PT (230hp) and 5.300 PT (300hp) use the same 6.7-litre six-pot FPT Stage V motor. “The 230hp engine suits the 5,000-litre model very well and opens up a new segment for Horsch,” said Stephen Burcham, general manager at Horsch UK. “We have already seen a lot of interest from farmers wanting a high capacity, high precision self-propelled sprayer but at lower entry point.” Cat IV filtration, an advanced A-column terminal and new armrest and joystick are standard. Pneumatic four-point cab suspension is optional. Boom widths are from 24m to 48m. 50 YEARS OF PÖTTINGER ARABLE MACHINES It is 50…

Described as a weight-optimised and cost-effective 6.0m trailed compact disc harrow, the Catros+ 6003-2TS Special is said to offer the same advantages of the existing models in the Catros family. Suitable for working depths from 5.0cm to 14cm, operating speeds of up to 18km/hr are said to give the best results, and the axle load is below 3.5t in all configurations. The fixed basic configuration includes a Cat III lower linkage, hydraulic working depth adjustment, 510mm coarse serrated discs and maintenance-free disc bearings. A large selection of rollers are available.…

Horsch has developed a trailed variant of its Finer cultivator. Available in working widths of 7.0m and 8.0m, the Finer XL, which joins the four mounted Finer SL (5.0m-8.0m) models, offers the same working depth range from 2.0cm to 10cm. Suitable for stubble cultivation, seedbed preparation and mechanical weed control, tine spacing is 15cm and the two trailed models are available with a 5.0cm or 20cm wing point. The 52cm bar spacing and high clearance is said to result in full-width cutting, and the Finer XL is said to provide good results in high volumes of surface trash. A wide range of packer and harrow combinations are available. Wider and narrower working widths are in the pipeline as well as a version with only a harrow and without a packer.…

Some countries include compacts, and some others even ATVs, so quoting precise figures is out of the question. However, approx. 6.5% fewer new (50hp+) tractors were registered in mainland Europe in 2024 and a total just shy of 140,000. Spain, Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands bucked the trend, but registrations dropped in all other countries, including the top three markets of France, Germany and Italy. Accounting for 33,225 of the total, France remains the most important tractor market in Europe. Registrations dropped by -3.4% in the second largest market of Germany (29,315), and despite the 12.3% dip in the numbers, Italy held on to third spot with 15,448 units. When added together, these three markets made up 77,988 of total (83,623 in 2023) registrations last year. Curious to know how…

The Claas Scorpion range consists of three larger frame models (the 746, 756 and 950) along with five smaller size machines (638, 733, 738, 742 and 1033), and it is these latter models that have recently been updated. To find out just what has changed we grabbed the chance to take a closer look at the Claas 742 Varipower. News about the cab The biggest updates relate to inside the cab. Firstly, there is the joystick, which is now attached to the seat and moves with it. The control layout and the level of specification now matches those of the large models. A new hydraulic system with electronic pilot control brings smart loading functions to this handler range. This includes an auto shake function and fine hydraulic control for slowing…

Visit any big ag show and if you’re not careful you can become bedazzled by the swarm of diminutively-dimensioned bend-in-the-middle machines from all corners of the planet. So, we were somewhat surprised when a few years back another name appeared in the mix. Started close to Venice in northern Italy in 2020, Neomach appears to be emerging from its embryonic post-COVID chrysalis phase into something of a competitor for the likes of Avant, MultiOne and Norcar. Today the firm offers three models – the Nova X20 with a 912kg rated lift capacity, the 1,080kg lift X30 and the flagship X40 which can hoist 1,290kg to just shy of 3.0m skywards. While all three vary in weight (and importantly are all legally roadtowable), the two smaller machines share the same basic…

When we were doing our precision planter and front hopper test comparison last spring, it soon became apparent that there is no standardised solution for fitting the delivery hoses to the tractor. And with the rising popularity of front hoppers, it would be really useful, for example, if there were threaded holes on the outside of the cab. For now, custom solutions require a lot of creativity, and there is always that lingering doubt: “will this hold up to all of the bumps, thumps and vibrations in the field.” Key points to consider are where to fasten the mounting bracket on the tractor chassis or cab especially with the latter where there is regular movement from the suspension. Also, check whether the pipe is protected against static charge and offers…

profi and Michelin Tyre plc have joined forces to offer a lucky profi reader the chance to win two places on the Porsche Driving Experience at the legendary Silverstone circuit. This fantastic prize will give you and a friend a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to drive a variety of high performance Porsche sports cars under the guidance of experienced professional instructors. "At the forefront of performance tyre technology, Michelin agricultural tyres are designed to enhance productivity and efficiency in farming operations, providing superior traction, durability, and comfort for a variety of agricultural machinery. Celebrating 20 years in 2024, Michelin’s UltraFlex technology has revolutionized the industry by allowing farmers to operate at lower tyre pressures, reducing soil compaction and increasing yields by up to 4%. This innovative technology offers real-world benefits such as…

Breakdowns. You never know when they’re going to happen, or how long they’ll take to diagnose and repair. The only certainty is that they go hand-in-hand with running tractors and machinery. With modern kit having more ECU’s and sensors than ever before, those breakdowns are now far more likely to be electrical, than mechanical. Having the ability to plug-in and assess what’s going on is no longer the preserve of the main dealer, as contractors and large farming businesses are looking towards diagnostic equipment to reduce downtime and improve machine availability. For Devon-based Barnes Contracting run by brothers Bobby, Michael and Richard, with their parents Andy and Sue, their investment in Jaltest diagnostic equipment has been a game changer when it comes to keeping wheels turning. “We took the decision…

When AGCO introduced its Masey Ferguson and Fendt Ideal rotary combine ranges in 2018 it was a landmark event. This was the first time an MF rotary combine had been actively marketed in the UK since the late 1980s, and this had only been for an extremely limited time, indeed it was a bit of a flash in the pan. But interestingly, the company had made a US-manufactured range of rotary models available in other markets for this entire period with good success. The Massey rotary traces its lineage back to the innovative White Farm Equipment 9700 Axial Harvest Boss combine, introduced in 1979. When the WFE combine line was sold to Massey Ferguson in 1985, the updated White 9720 became the MF 8590 which was briefly offered in the…

DRIVING IMPRESSION KRM Sola Grass Seeder Our test team assesses KRM’s entry to the grass drill market and sees how Sola has used various proven components from its other drills to give grassland a freshen-up. DRIVING IMPRESSION Agriweld Min Disc There has been a boom in low-disturbance subsoilers in recent years for the arable sector, but this trend also provides those with grassland a wider choice, too. We try out the Agriweld Min Disc. USED MACHINERY Claas Axion 800 With an updated Axion 800 due to be unveiled later this year, we thought it was time to update our used machinery buying advice from the last time we looked at these tractors … way back in 2014. PRACTICAL TEST Pöttinger Aerosem VT DD The semi-mounted power harrow drill market is…