Based in Cleariestown Co Wexford, brothers Eoin and Richard Rochford run a calf-to-beef and tillage enterprise, alongside an agricultural contracting business. Rearing 180 calves, the majority of which are Wagyu, all stock are brought through to finish.
The tillage enterprise is made up of cereals, beet and a large area of maize, which in turn feeds into the brothers’ maize baling business. Not alone do they bale close to 200 acres of their own maize, the brothers travel up and down the country, baling maize on hire with their Orkel static baler.
The contracting side of the business pretty much offers every service, from sowing corn to cutting silage and spreading slurry. The fleet is made up of 20 tractors, with 10 mainline tractors, all of which are Ford and New Holland.
Square baling straw has always been a massive part of the Rochfords’ business. In good years, square bale numbers hit well into the thousands, much of which is destined for the mushroom industry. Numbers very much vary depending on crop rotations.
In a world of go-go-go and modern high-output machinery, there are fewer and fewer people thinking outside the box. This definitely isn’t the case with the Rochford brothers, who buy machinery for their contracting business from all across Europe.
Eoin is a qualified truck mechanic and Richard studied mechanical engineering, so the two brothers aren’t afraid to take on any project.
“About six or seven years ago, we began looking into buying a pre-chop baler. The reason behind this was at the time, wheaten straw was a more desirable product than barley straw, in our area. When we would buy straw on the flat, farmers would only give us the wheaten straw if we would take the barley straw, which today, is hard to believe. We began looking into chopping the barley straw, to add value to the product,” explained Eoin.
“We soon learned of the extraordinary buying prices of the balers with pre-chop systems and looked at how we could fit a simpler and cheaper option to one of our existing balers.
“The obvious option for us was to try and fit a chopping unit from a combine onto one of our balers. We decided to fit it to a Hesston 4910.”
Hesston 4910
The Rochfords run three square balers, a Hesston 4910 with now over 100,000 bales on the counter and two New Holland BB9090s. The infamous Hesston 4910 large square baler was manufactured from 1997 until 2005. For those unfamiliar, it’s a popular 8x4x4 baler.
The Hesston 4910 square baler was built in Hesston, Kansas, United States, at the historic manufacturing plant. This factory was originally founded by the Hesston Corporation and later operated by AGCO. The Hesston 4910 and its sibling models are well-known within tillage strongholds within Ireland, but would be more common in the UK, sharing a strong heritage tied closely to Massey Ferguson dealer networks.
Meanwhile, the BB9090 was introduced around 2008 as a replacement for the BB980, and was also built in the Hesston factory in Kansas. It was built by AGCO for New Holland, sharing a foundational platform with Massey Ferguson’s 2190 baler.
Teaching an old dog new tricks
The Hesston 4910 large square balers weren’t available from the factory with a built-in pre-chop or rotor cutter option. Like a traditional square baler, it utilised a standard fork-type packer and stuffer fork system designed for straight-material baling.
When the Rochfords went about sourcing a chopping unit from a combine to fit to one of their balers, it was completely new to them. Eoin explained that they had never seen or heard of this being done before, but then thought ‘why not?’.
They visited Bernard Byrne Combines Ltd, a local combine breaker near Gorey. There, they purchased a chopper from a New Holland TX 36 for €1,000.
The straw chopper on a New Holland TX 36 combine works by using high-speed spinning knives, stationary counter-knives and a deflector hood to cut and spread residue. On the combine, the chopping system is driven by the main engine belts, with the chopper drum spinning at over 3,000 rpm.
As processed straw exits the six straw walkers and falls into the rear housing, the rotating pivoting knives pass closely against fixed stationary counter-knives, cutting the straw into fine pieces.
Buying the chopping unit was the easy part, but mounting and powering the unit was when the headaches would start. The Rochford brothers initially mounted the chopping system onto the balers drawbar, with raising and lowering of the unit controlled via two rams. A split gearbox was sourced, to split the drive which was used for the flywheel.
This drive was used to power a large pulley, with a belt powering the chopping unit. This worked well, except when turning tight, the tractors rear wheel was liable to catch the pulley, so further modifications were required.
The second issue they ran into was the original drawbar on the Hesston baler was too short and it was very low.
Ahead of its second season, the drawbar was lengthened by 18 inches and reinforced. The Rochfords explained that it also took a serious number of man hours to get the correct height setting of the chopping unit.
The next major problem they ran into was dealing with the huge volume of chaff and dust the chopping unit created. To deal with this, they rigged up fans at the front and rear of the chopping unit, to reduce the dust burden.
Trial and error
In a similar fashion, the dust and chaff were causing more issues further back, clogging up the knotters and causing mis-ties. To alleviate this, a used fan was sourced from a Deutz-Fahr four walker combine, and powered off a newly fitted pulley, which was mounted on a nearby feeder clutch. Getting the fan speed up to where it was required involved a trial and error. A crop roller was sourced from a local scrap yard, and the entire frame was fabricated in house.
Eoin explained that after hundreds of man hours, the chopping unit is now running very well for them.
“Fitting the chopping unit sounded very straight forward, but it took a serious amount of time to get it up and running properly. There is quite a bit of upkeep to keeping the chopping unit running sweetly. Chopping a large volume of straw is pretty hard on the knives. Stones will break the stationary knives.
“The blades are close to €8 each, and there’s around 130 blades between the stationary and swinging blades. We are changing these an average of twice per season, to get through about 2,000 bales. It’s costing over 50c/bale.
“When doing maintenance work, we generally replace the swinging blades underneath the pickup through the pit in the garage, while the stationary blades can be replaced from the front of the machine.
“We run the Hesston 4910 on a Ford 8970A Genesis. This tractor has a 7.5-litre powered engine with 260 horsepower. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how much extra power you would need for the pre-chop system, but we would say it’s somewhere in the region of 50 to 100hp extra.”
Chop consistency
“The faster you drive, the longer the chop length will be. Forward speed is very much dependent on the crop. In lighter swaths, you’ll be baling at 5-6mph, while in heavy crops you will be back to 3mph.
“We find the chop consistency to be very good, to be fair. We run the chopping unit slightly higher than the pickup reel which follows. The chopping unit tends to create a vacuum, sucking up the straw. It gathers a good 90-95% of the straw, with the remaining fragments gathered by the pickup.
“Despite the shorter chop, bale weights aren’t much higher than the non-chopped bales. Handling the chopped bales isn’t an issue. We find that the chopped straw doesn’t want to spring like tightly packed non-chopped bales,” explained Eoin.
Popularity of chopped straw
In recent years, many livestock finishers and dairy farmers have moved to use more and more chopped straw, in total mix rations (TMR). Data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) shows that in total across 2025, 59,415t of straw was imported into Ireland. To the discontent of growers, a huge volume of this straw is imported from Spain and the UK.
The likes of this Spanish straw is popular among livestock farmers because it offers consistent quality, a precise chop length and low moisture. It is sold on a weight basis rather than by the bale. What’s more, this imported straw is commanding a premium price over Irish straw.
This is a very contentious issue among Irish growers, as imported straw is not subject to phytosanitary checks and carries a major biosecurity risk with weeds in particular for Irish farms.
Will we see more farmers like the Rochfords trying to value add to their own farm produce?