Hillside Leveling
In the Palouse region of the Pacific Northwest of the United States the combine is retrofitted with a hydraulic hillside leveling system. This allows the combine to harvest the steep but fertile soil in the region. Hillsides can be as steep as a 50% slope. Gleaner, IH and Case IH, John Deere, and others all have made combines with this hillside leveling system, and local machine shops have fabricated them as an aftermarket add-on.
The first leveling technology was developed by Holt Co., a California firm, in 1891. Modern leveling came into being with the invention and patent of a level sensitive mercury switch system invented by Raymond Alvah Hanson in 1946. Raymond's son, Raymond, Jr., produced leveling systems exclusively for John Deere combines until 1995 as R. A. Hanson Company, Inc. In 1995, his son, Richard, purchased the company from his father and renamed it RAHCO International, Inc. In April, 2007, the company was renamed The Factory Company International, Inc. Production continues to this day.
Hillside leveling has several advantages. Primary among them is an increased threshing efficiency on hillsides. Without leveling, grain and chaff slide to one side of separator and come through the machine in a large ball rather than being separated, dumping large amounts of grain on the ground. By keeping the machinery level, the straw-walker is able to operate more efficiently, making for more efficient threshing. IH produced the 453 combine which leveled both side-to-side and front-to-back, enabling efficient threshing whether on a hillsides or climbing a hill head on.
Secondarily, leveling changes a combine's center of gravity relative to the hill and allows the combine to harvest along the contour of a hill without tipping, a very real danger on the steeper slopes of the region; it is not uncommon for combines to roll on extremely steep hills.
Newer leveling systems do not have as much tilt as the older ones. A John Deere 9600 combine equipped with a Rahco hillside conversion kit will level over to 44%, while the newer STS combines will only go to 35%. These modern combines use the rotary grain separator which makes leveling less critical. Most combines on the Palouse have dual drive wheels on each side to stabilize them.
Sidehill leveling system in Europe was developed by Italian combines' manufacturer Laverda that still today produces those systems as a leader.
Read more about this topic: Combine Harvester
Famous quotes containing the word hillside:
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)