Cliff’s customers are varied. Some are intensively managed dairies who are focused on milk production and prefer to hire a specialist to make the silage. Other people with good hayland take the option to work nearby in Winnipeg and “farm out” the farm or portions of it. And on some of the smaller farms, it’s just more economical to hire a specialist than to purchase and operate a line of equipment.

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Skyline Harvest

Cliff set up the new company, Skyline Harvest Corp., in 2001 with his family members as partners. Partners include his wife, Ramona, two daughters, Kimberly and Amanda; and two sons, Jason and Vincent. All four children are involved in the farming operation. Jason and Vincent work full-time in the business with their Dad.

Cliff had been in partnership with his brother, Leo Braun, in Braunsdale Holsteins Ltd. That dairy milks about 500 cows three times a day, making it one of the largest dairy operations on the Prairies.

“We split Braunsdale the way our interests were, so we’d have two separate family enterprises,” Cliff says. “We still do all the cropping for the dairy, farm about 1,000 acres of alfalfa and wheat for ourselves and take on as much custom cropping as we can take.”

Skyline’s operations include complete “silage deals” from cutting the hay to harvesting, trucking and packing. They also do custom hauling of liquid and dry manure, custom baling, custom seeding and custom combining.

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Key equipment

A New Holland FX58 self-propelled forage harvester is central to Skyline’s operations.

“We’ve had quite a few silage machines,” Cliff says. “This FX58 replaced two New Holland pull-type harvesters. On this machine, one guy can do the job of two operators on the smaller machines.”

A New Holland FX58 forage harvester is the heart of the Braun’s custom harvesting operation. Although they’re planning to expand their custom work, forage harvesting currently comprises about 60% of the business.

In addition to the FX58, he has a New Holland TV140 Bidirectional™ tractor equipped with twin 18-foot push-pull Haybine® mower-conditioners. Jason Braun operated the FX58 for the 2001 season, harvesting around 2,000 acres and putting on a little over 200 hours between late June and the third cutting in October. Most of it was done with a quarter-inch cut, limiting his harvest speed to 15 to 20 acres an hour. Last year was a very wet season. Southeast Manitoba went into the fall with extremely wet ground conditions. Rain held off long enough for most crops to be seeded in May but between early June and late July, the region had about 15 inches of rain.

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Jason says, “There was a lot of mud. We just went through the mud with the FX58. We never found a mud hole that it would get stuck in. With this machine you can just go right over almost any condition.”

Red River clay soil

The standard Red River clay soil becomes extremely slippery and sticky when wet and it’s difficult for trucks to get traction.

Where it was too wet for trucks, the Brauns use a high-dump silage cart pulled by the harvester. Jason says, “The FX58 pulled out trucks full of silage all the time. It’s a full four-wheel drive tractor, so you could just wrap a chain around the hitch and yank a truck out. The high dump made tracks, but the forage harvester didn’t. It has good, wide tires.”

When harvest conditions were “very gummy,” Jason says, the FX58 did get plugged a couple times. They were putting 36-foot swaths through the 15-foot wide pickup, at anywhere from 40% to 65% moisture, on days that were hot and heavy with humidity.

“Wetter silage is easier to handle. It’s harder to blow into the silo, but it doesn’t gum up the machine,” Cliff says. “I don’t expect that to be a problem anymore,” Jason adds. Over the winter, a pump and 100-gallon tank for water or inoculant was added to the harvester’s platform. “We didn’t have water to add last year; this year, we do. Just a trickle of water will keep the blower pipe clean.” Having twin openings for fan air on either side of the harvester, and self-cleaning screens, makes working with haylage easier. “Haylage is really dusty,” Jason says. A single screen system can plug fairly often and overheat the engine.

Cliff Braun and his son, Jason. Other family members involved in the Braun’s custom harvesting operation are Cliff’s wife, Ramona; daughters Kimberly and Amanda, and son, Vincent. Vincent and Jason work full-time in the business with their Dad.

“When you have dust on one side screen of the FX58, the other side stays open. We’ve never overheated it, even on the hottest days. We could push it as hard as we wanted and couldn’t overheat it.”

A custom harvester is expected to be able to handle tough conditions. Sometimes, because the season was so wet, haylage crops grew beyond the ideal height.

Cliff says, “We had swaths that were very big. It was very long material, and this machine handled it better than any we’ve had before. Oats can get up to four feet tall, quite easily, and this machine can handle that kind of stuff.”

Overall, Jason says, their key machine for custom work performs very well.

“It eats up a lot of material very quickly. You sharpen knives and adjust the shear bar from within the cab. You can easily maintain your sharp knives all day, and you don’t have to get out to do it. We could just go all day.”