(uplifting music)
- I'm Tom Schwinn.
I'm second generation here.
We've been dairying here since '50s.
Now my boys and my nephews
are farming with us.
- We like to mow enough
early in the morning.
Then we usually chop later that evening.
Then the next morning we'd
like to get enough down
to keep the chopper, you know,
give it a full day's work.
We had been running
two 10-foot side pull
mowers in the grass hay
and three in this alfalfa
in order to get enough cut.
- They were good mowers but
they were just so wore out,
it was really hard to keep them running.
We had three of them
and one of them is
practically always broke down.
- [Tom] It's hard to
get two or three drivers
free to mow hay so we wanted
to get it down to one operator,
be able to mow a lot in a day
but still be able to use our old tractors
and fold up and go up and down the road.
It's hard not to be impressed
by 20-foot mower swath 20-foot wide
and how much you can get
mowed in a couple of hours.
We went from five acres an hour
to 12 to 14 acres an hour
real easily with this.
- It helped us by having other people
doing more important
things than mowing hay.
We're getting more stuff done
and don't have to run three tractors.
It's more efficient.
- [Tom] The biggest impact is capacity.
We just get more hay mowed
per hour of tractor time.
We mow about 1100 acres of hay a year.
That part of it has really
done what we'd hoped.
We've mowed it with one tractor,
one operator, no problem.
It's got several features
about it that I like
other than just size.
We went from spring float cutter bars
to this hydraulic accumulator.
It makes quite a difference
on that as far as bouncing.
- I've really caught on to it and like it.
- I was doing most of the mowing.
Then we switched to this and
now we can't get him out of it.
It just makes it a lot simpler to mow,
to put up your alfalfa and hay.
- The concern we had with it was
not having a conditioner of any kind.
But since we've got it,
we haven't really had no reason to ...
We haven't missed it.
It's a lot of moving parts
that's not on there to maintain.
If you're gonna keep mowing hay,
you might as well have
good equipment to mow with.
You don't wanna be working on that mower
when you should be mowing.
I'm Tom Schwinn and that's why I switched
to the Vermeer TM1410 trailed mower.
(uplifting music)
