The mad rush of the silage season will soon be upon us, and with it will come the buzz of self harvesters shooting up and down the fields.
We are all familiar with today’s big names, New Holland, John Deere, Krone etc. but there is one make we won’t be seeing in the fields, even though the company was a pioneer in the design and production of these machines, and shouldn’t be forgotten. The Field Of Queen Legacy. That company is Field Queen of Kansas, from a town called, appropriately enough, Maize, situated in the middle of the Great Plains.
The story starts back in 1946 when two college friends got together to chat about their post-war plans and decide to enter the alfalfa processing industry. This was a good business at the time with dried alfalfa being pelleted, bagged and sold as a high protein feed throughout the US The resulting harvester was still towed by a tractor, but the machine had an auxiliary engine powering a Gel chopper, which blew the crop directly into a following hopper type trailer.
It was Ray Bert’s mother who suggested it be called the Field Queen, and so that’s what it became. Booming Business That was in 1948, and during that summer and following winter, Van Horn put together a self version, powered by a six-cylinder Waukesha engine mounted above the rear axle. The machines were an immediate success and within a few short years the company had established itself as not only a leader in the alfalfa drying business, but also as a manufacturer of harvesting equipment which could handle a variety of crops. Working with Heston The earlier models were designed mainly for alfalfa but as the 1960s wore on, other forage crops grew in importance and a new machine, known as the Field Queen Standard, was created to cater for the broadening range of plant type.
At the time this was being developed, the company agreed to work with the Heston Corporation which was also keen to break into the forage crop market, and so it became a joint effort. However, the companies remained separate entities and Field Queen made it quite clear that it would continue selling the harvester in its colors.
The Heston version of the machine was known as the 4000; it had some detail differences, notably the cheaper cutting blades and one or two other items made to a budget to keep the cost down.
A Caterpillar engine of 200hp was used to power the machine at the outset. Later, a 257hp Detroit Diesel was offered as an option. Field Queen and the Side Dump At about this time their largest customer, National Alfalfa of Colorado, asked them to take a further step and build a self-unloading side dump unit.
It took Field Queen just six months to get a prototype machine with a 660ft³ container ready for the field. It was based on an enlarged Standard model with the frame enlarged. The engine moved back It worked through a combination of hydraulic rams and cables that pulled the floor of the hopper up to a 45° angle as it was raised, allowing all the crop to be tipped. The dump height was set at 10ft, which was considered ample at the time.
The trick was to keep the body of the copper within the dimensions of the vehicle’s frame to help with the stability. It appeared to work, on the flat dry plains of the US at least Solis Construction It worked through a combination of hydraulic rams and cables that pulled the floor of the hopper up to a 45° angle as it was raised, allowing all the crop to be tipped. The dump height was set at 10ft, which was considered ample at the time.
The Field Queen Side Dump stayed in production, relatively unchanged, until 1982, although by then, events had overtaken the company and if it was no longer Field Queen producing them.
It was due to the development costs and requirements for extra capital to run the Field Queen business in the early 1970s, that the founders of Field Queen decided to seek a buyer for the machinery side of the original Bert and Etta Sales company. Field Queen Sells To Heston, During the years 1971 to 1976, the company claimed to be the biggest supplier of self-propelled forage harvesters in the world.
All went well throughout the mid 1970s, yet the clouds of a farming recession were gathering, hitting Heston hard. In 1976, production at the Maize factory was halved and the workforce reduced to 120, down from the total at its peak of 280. A Sad Decline, The following year it was all over. Heston, which was badly exposed financially to the agricultural downturn, decided to close the Maize factory and was purchased by Fiat the same year. Fiat had little idea as to what to do with an aging design of forage harvest, and spent little or no money developing it.
Production was switched to the old Baud combine factory at Cox in France, where a later model, the 7730, was built.
This machine was available with or without a tipping container and although it didn’t sell particularly well, it laid the foundations for the much more successful 7725 and 7735 models, which did, and they became very popular with contractors in Ireland.
You must be logged in to post a comment.