When the going gets tough, the Cyclone pushes the roughness aside and keeps on cutting for Tom Grant in New Zealand
The geographical nature of the Bay of Plenty, or the Kiwifruit capital of the world, in North Island, New Zealand is ideal for agricultural and forestry activities. It also demands robust and durable machinery to cope with the toughest conditions, a job the Major Cyclone proves to handle without fail.
For Tom Grant of Grant Farms, Ltd, the award-winning Cyclone mower was the ideal solution. “We do agricultural as well as earth moving contracting – it’s the guts of the business for the last 37 years. We’re managing an area of 400 hectares from various states of pasture, from rough stuff to the good stuff. We plan on making this rough stuff into good stuff. Before, we’d generally just do land clearance with a bulldozer – we’d bulldoze it all into a pile and bury it”.
Land management techniques are changing to have less impact on the environment. Bulldozing requires lots of time and resources, something farmers and contractors increasingly have less of. “We’re doing a kind of land clearing mulching – it leaves the root system there, which we think might be more eco-friendly. The Major Cyclone can knock it down and keep pastures in order. It can chop some pretty massive stuff. Prior to that we would get in a bulldozer with a root rake and just root rake it all”.
When the Bay of Plenty Regional Council needed to clear a riverbank, Tom knew the Cyclone – a superior alternative to a flail mower – was up to the task. “It was the worst piece of riverbank to start with. There was a flood 12 months ago and hidden in the long grass are willow logs. But we just attacked this piece of overgrowth with Mr. Major and within 10 minutes we hit a willow log. It sheared the shearbolt off but it spat the log out – didn’t wreck the machine at all. We put on another bolt and were away. It only ever did one bolt”.
“A reason we got this mower is because it’s tough. We bought it for the staff to tidy up pastures and doing the topping. Farm staff don’t really like these jobs so they’d come back with a mower that’s demolished or half a mower with the other half tied up on a trough or something. If the machine comes back in one piece that’s really quite a bonus for the day”.
Final words from Tom: “You can be rough with this and it’ll just push the roughness to one side and just keep cutting”.