The funniest solution for a laborintensive issue. We have been spreading champost for all our live in the orchard. but between 2014 and 2020 we have not done so because we found it too labour intensive. in the 1980’s and 1990’s this was all done by hand, so dad would drive the champost in the orchard with the bucket, and my granduncle would shove it under the trees with the hand rake. This was very heavy work, and very time consuming. Since 2000 we have done a few passes with manure spreaders and also liquid manure. The liquid manure was a bad choice. The manure spreaders were just a pain because loading was slow, and spreading just got everything dirty. we spent about 2 days back then to spread 1 trailer of champost out without getting it on the position where we want.
We looked into spreaders multiple times, and know there are nice machines out there, but the loading always remained an issue to us.
In 2020 i ran across a cowfeeder which actually looked like able to spread champost. We drove up to the machine, looked at it and bought it. How it would work we did not know. We just had to figure it out. To give it a test dad ordered 1 truckload of champost, and we figured out how to get this machine connected to our orchard tractor properly. We needed all frontweight to keep the tractor down, but it worked.
The bucket is able to tilt back completely to load itself which is a lovely feature. this allowed us to fill a bucket within 30 seconds on the headland and then head back into the row. Spreading a bucket filled with 1,5m3 of champost takes about 1 minute, leaving a round of spreading on a time of about 5 minutes while getting the champost on the exact location where we want it. This now allows us to spread out 6 walking floor trailers in a day by a single person, which is a amazing efficient process. This is defenitly one of the very succesful experiments!
During the first season we figured out that the driving mechanism was having some issues. The drive gear for the big auger had some issues, and i eventually had to drill 4 boltholes and bolt 2 gears together to make sure these can handle the torque without breaking the shaft.
Unfortunaly once we fixed this issue dad got a big rock inside the machine, and the old auger got twisted and broke completely. We did have to manufacture a new auger in this first season but the new auger will defenitly last for many years again.
Since we got this champost spreader we spread a few trailers of champost every year and don’t have to worry about the work as it mostly only takes about a day to get all the champost onto it’s place into the orchard. it’s nice work to do with this machine compared to doing it by hand.
In 2021 we modified the champost spreader a bit by taking the quick exchange off and making a more controlled outlet. I also added some steel onto the top mixing axle as it was missing a few pieces to mix well. By taking off the quick exchange we gained about 20cm to get the machine closer to the tractor, and that made it alot better liftable for the tractor.