J-P,
Thanks for the offer - I'm interested to see what you can find.
To set you on the right road, I am NOT interested in peat milling production as this takes a lot of expensive equipment. Finland and Ireland have a well developed industry for this.
Ideally, an automated version of the scheme that Renze describes a couple of posts back would be ideal. I can use my MF 50B digger to get the raw turf out of the bog (raw turf is 90% water), use the digger to load it into a trailer, transport it to a hard stand area in the farmyard, compress a cylinder of turf hydraulically with the
Zetor Crystal (ref my original post re the automatic reciprocating
hydraulic circuit) to reduce the mositure content (if I could even get it to 60% this would be a big improvment!), rack it automatically on pallets to 10 sods high leaving gaps as Renze described and then let the wind do the remainder of the drying. Once fully air dried (this will take many weeks even months depending on the weather), the pallets can be picked up and tipped in a shed. No
manual handling! Hallelujah!!!
I have put together a Powerpoint presentation that reviews exisitng technologies and outlines a proposal for my machine. If anyone is interested, ask me for a copy tomreaney@eircom.net
BTW I used to cut turf by hand 30 years ago, We used a sln (pronounced SLA-IN) to take sods like Renze described out of the bog. It was bloody hard work!
Given the rising price of
oil , the financial impetus for this is growing.
Best of all it is green and eco friendly as bog re-generates and the CO2 emissions are matched by that absorbed when the moss is growing.
TomZ
Tom