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A Windrower is a type of Implement in Farming Simulator 17. It can combine Piles of Grass, Hay or Straw together, leaving behind a single line of material that can be easily picked up by another machine.

As Mowers, Tedders and Harvesters work on a field, they leave trails of material behind them on the ground. Picking up each individual trail can be time-consuming, and some machines (especially Tedders) leave a whole mess on the ground that is very difficult to pick up in a single go. A Windrower can be used to combine all of this material together into neatly-arranged lines. Once the Windrower has finished its work, a Loading Wagon, Baler, or other tool can be used to easily collect all of this material in just a few passes.

Farming Simulator 17 offers 3 different models of Windrowers. The primary difference between models is their Working Width; The wider the model, the faster it can finish the same amount of work, and the fewer trails are left behind it for pickup.

List of Windrowers

Below is a list of all 3 models of Windrowers in Farming Simulator 17. All three models can be found in the "Windrowers" category at the store.

Name Price Maint. Cost
per Day
Working
Width
Horsepower
Consumption
Weight
FS17 Poettinger-TOP462
Pöttinger TOP 462
9,000 10 3.6 14 767
FS17 Kuhn-GA9531
Kuhn GA 9531
28,000 40 9.3 27 2,405
FS17 Lely-Hibiscus1515CDProfi
Lely Hibiscus 1515 CD Profi
62,000 70 14.8 40 5,645

Notes for Table

  • All Windrowers enforce a speed limit of 18 km/h / 11 mph while working.
  • All Windrowers have a Three-point hitch at the front.

Windrowing

A Windrower's job is to rearrange Piles of Grass, Hay or Straw that are lying on the ground, merging the material together into a single continuous line - a Windrow. This makes it much easier to pick up the material using a Loading Wagon, Baler or Pickup Header.

Windrowing is only necessary in certain circumstances. Some machines, like a Universal Cutter, collect the Grass that they cut immediately into a Container, removing the need to collect them separately afterwards. A large model of Harvester creating a Straw Swath leaves it in neatly-arranged rows that won't benefit very much from Windrowing at all. However, machines like Mowers and especially Tedders leave behind a whole mess of material, which would take many passes to pick up. This is where Windrowers become extremely useful.

Windrowers do not change the material itself - they only rearrange it. Also, they can only work with the materials listed above (Grass, Hay, Straw). They will ignore Piles of any other material.

Creating Loose Material Piles

There are several ways to create the kind of piles that a Windrower can work with. Most of these methods are organic results of using other tools to process your fields - e.g. mowing a field of grass. Additionally, a Windrower can work with piles of material that were simply dumped out of any machine or Container.

FS17 Windrowers Grass

TOP: The Loading Wagon must make many back and forth passes to pick up the many trails left by a Mower.

BOTTOM: A Windrower collects several trails into a single large one, reducing the number of Loading Wagon passes by a huge factor.

Mowers, when cutting grass, leave behind narrow trails of loose Grass. Whether you use multiple mowing heads simultaneously or just one, the result will be many trails of grass on the field, with small gaps between them. Furthermore, if you were mowing manually (i.e. no Hired Workers), the trails left by the mower might be squiggly or intermittent. Windrowing these trails condenses them together, significantly reducing the number of passes you'll need to make in order to pick up all of the grass.

Tedders almost always leave messy trails behind them, as they spread out the Grass on the field in very wide trails. Picking up after a Tedder pass is very time consuming. A Windrower pass is practically essential!

Harvesters working on a Wheat or Barley field can be instructed to leave a Straw Swath behind them as they work. The straw from a harvester is usually very neatly arranged. However, if the harvester is very small, the gap between one row and the next can be quite small - requiring many back-and-forth passes to collect later on. A very wide Windrower can combine two or more rows into a single row, reducing the number of collection passes you'll need to make. The largest Harvesters, however, leave such a big gap between rows that it really doesn't make sense to use a Windrower at all.

How a Windrower Works

As the Windrower moves along the ground, it grabs up any Grass, Hay, or Straw pile that it touches, and moves the pile in a given direction - typically towards the center of the machine. Once the material reaches a designated spot (the "Drop Area"), it is released onto the ground.

If two or more piles reach the Drop Area at the same time, they are merged together into a new, larger pile once they are released.

No matter which part of the Windrower touches piles, they are all shifted towards the Drop Area. Therefore, if the Windrower continuously comes into contact with more and more piles of material, it will form a continuous line of piles as it moves. In this way, a bunch of scattered piles are arranged into a single long Windrow.

Mower/Windrower Combination

Main article: Mowers (Farming Simulator 17)
FS17 Mowers WindrowCombo

A three-headed mower combo towing a Windrower, immediately combining all three grass trails into a single trail.

As explained previously in this article, mowing Grass results in many individual trails of material lying on the field. This makes it practically necessary to follow the mower with a Windrower, merging the materials into a few condensed rows, so that later a pick-up vehicle could collect everything in just a few passes.

To make the process more efficient, it is possible to mount a Windrower on the same Tractor that mows the grass. Mower heads at the front of the Tractor cut the grass, while the Windrower behind the tractor immediately arranges them into lines.

The exact models of Mowers and Windrowers used for the job can have a major effect on the result:

  • A multi-head Mower will not work well with a small Windrower (with Side Unloading). The Windrower will only affect the central trail, leaving the other trails untouched. However it's still better than nothing.
  • The benefit from using a small Windrower (with Side Unloading) and narrow Mower is limited. It will combine every 2 trails into a single Windrow, halving the number of pickup passes needed to collect the grass afterwards.
  • With a single-head Mower and a wider Windrower (Center Unloading), the result will be that the Windrower will combine every new trail of Grass with previous trails. On each pass, the Windrower will pick up everything that was collected on previous passes, adding it into the new Windrow. As a result, with each pass your windrow will grow denser and denser. Essentially, you'll end up with only one massive Windrow. This makes it highly efficient in theory, but the resulting Windrow may be so steep that a pickup vehicle could struggle trying to collect it.
  • The best setup is to use multi-head Mowers (a "Center" mower and a "Double" mower) together with a wide Windrower. This will result in all mower trails being combined into a single Windrow on every pass. The windrows from previous passes will remain untouched, so they won't become increasingly steeper from one pass to the next. The end result will be a relatively small number of windrows that are easy to pick up.
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