In 2012 we were were approached by a local deer farmer.  He asked us to design and manufacture a fodder beet bucket to harvest his fodder beet which would fit his 80hp tractor. This was deemed to be a great success, enabling the farmer to harvest approximately one ton / minute of fodder beet for feeding out.

Another local dairy farmer saw this prototype working and immediately saw the benefits of this particular design. Subsquently, the Mark 2 fodder beet bucket was produced – a 3.7m width, suitable to be used by his 150 hp tractor operating with dual back wheels. This farmer loaned his fodder beet bucket to several other farmers to try, all of whom had positive comments about it.

Further research and development was carried out, which has culminated in the final design.

Several alterations were made on both the prototype fodder beet buckets in developing the current models. For example:

• The frame design was changed so that the operator could see the level of the tips when setting it up.
• The angle of the hitch was adjusted so that the bucket could be tipped back further.
• Because of the hitch angle adjustment, we lengthened the skids to allow the fodder beet bucket to operate correctly during “float mode”.
• The interior braces of the bucket were filled in with gussets to ensure that crops did not get caught behind the braces when emptying the fodder beet bucket.
• We altered the side edges of the bucket to extend to the ends of the tips to ensure that any loosened beets were collected within the fodder beet bucket rather than falling outside the boundary of the fodder beet bucket thus being lost from harvest.
• The distance between the tips was extended allowing a more efficient design for faster operating