Combines Direct heading and drapers

not sure what you mean by direct heading but we straight cut 1100 acres of canola last year with MacDon drapers and it worked great.

By Direct heading I mean without windrowing first. Sounds like thats what you do.. Ive posted this question elsewhere and some responses have been astounded that anyone would do anything other than windrow, and the view has also been that ripe canola wouldnt feed along the belts because its too light and fluffy.. This isnt what youve found..IJ

Canola in Europe is called oilseed rape OSR for short, 100% of the crop here in Northern Ireland is staight cut with regular rigid headers fitted with an "osr sideknife" to seperate the crop when cutting out a flat. The OSR is sprayed with roundup a few weeks before harvest to ripen it. I guest its the saving of just having to pay for the spray versus buying a swarther and the pick-up head for the combine!!!

How about shatter lose at the header. Ripe rape pods are easily shattered, especially when trying to stuff the tangled up and interlocked plants and branches into the combine. Do you use a spray to keep the pods from shatteringIJ

OSR is sprayed with Ryglone and provided there are no stormy conditions between spraying and harvesting there is little problem with shatter loss when harvesting It is best to use an extension on the sickle knife bed or better still a Claas Vario header on the combine as the cutting bed on this moves out and in ref what crops your harvesting.

Ham, I did some last year - mainly because the crops were poor and it worked OK but there is some more losses. Slow the belts down bit and about 6-8k's is about all you can get through in a bushy crop. You have to change the timing on the feed drum so the fingers will grab the canola and pull it through. As I said, it can be done, but you have to wait for it all to ripen to 8% and you have the worry of the weather affect. My preferance would be to windrow - it might be a little extra expence but at least you'll sleep at night.

We had not sprayed it, we had left it to ripen, only shattering we noticed is where animals had run through it, Our crop was not a great one as we were very dry, 10bu acre. This was the first time we had done this as it would have blown away in a wind if windrowed. If I had a 40 bushel crop I would windrow it just so I could sleep at night. It fed into feederhouse excellent,we cut low to get all pods, no bunching and no noticable losses in header area. best of luck