Until now, harvesting forage meant either baling or ensiling it. The Krone Premos 5000 now offers a third option – creating pellets right in the field. The Premos can go straight into a field of swathed straw and compress it into 12mm x 30mm pellets in one pass.

Alternatively, the machine can also be used as a stationary unit in the farmyard out of season using straw bales instead.

So how does the machine work? The material is firstly picked up by the 2.35m pick-up, after which a rotor feeds it to a conveyor belt that offers an 800mm flow width. The belt feeds the material through two rollers (800mm wide, 800mm diameter) which act as ring dies, with rows of teeth alternating with rows of holes.

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The rollers work together, pressing the material into the holes and the 16mm diameter extrusion moulds. The finished pellets are then fed by augers inside the rollers on to a conveyor belt which takes them to a hopper which has a capacity of 5,000kg or 9m3 (photo, right). This pelleting system eliminates any energy-intensive pre-treatment such as chopping or milling, Krone claims that the energy demand is just half that required by stationary pelleting systems.

80°C temperature

The pelleting process generates temperatures of 80°C and pressures of up to 2,000 bar. In these conditions, the moisture content is 12-15 %, which allows the material to form lasting pellets. In material where moisture levels are low, operators can spray the material with small amounts of water or molasses to encourage effective bonding. For this reason, the pellets made by Premos are as easy to handle as heating oil. At a 600-700kg/m³ bulk density (three to four times the density of straw bales), an amount of 2.5kg pellets substitutes for about 1 kg of heating oil, a rate that translates into savings in comparison with oil and other fossil fuels.

It is also possible to use the pellets for bedding and as animal feed. Krone claims that 250g of straw pellets absorb about one litre of water, which means that manure volumes can be reduced by about 40 %. Pellets are rich in crude fibres and make good animal feed. They also offer the advantage of being easy to dose.

According to Krone’s head of marketing Niklow Beindorf, the new concept in straw management has the potential to become a game changer in the way farmers deal with their straw.

3-5t of straw pellets per hour

The man behind the concept, Kai Lupping, added that the Premos has a capacity to convert 3-5t of straw into pellets in one hour, which is considerably slower than normal practice of baling used on most farms and also requires a minimum of 400hp to work effectively at a forward speed of only 3-5km/h.

Having said all that, straw is typically moved over 40km when being processed into pellets in factories, whereas the Premos completes the same process in a machine length of just 4m.

Farmhand’s marketing manager Stephen Scrivener said that the company will move to import the new machine when it becomes available on the market. “The Premos is a very exciting machine as it can bring pellets from the field to the furnace in a matter of minutes,” Scrivener said.

Farmhand has been long associated with Krone and was established by Denis Scrivener and Dr Bernard Krone in 1959. Since then they have been the exclusive importer for the German machinery brand in Ireland.

The Premos is expected to be released within the next two years with a retail price rumoured to be in the region of €250,000. Will it be a machine of the future? Time will tell.