Review: Marcrest 210 baler

The Marcrest 210 and Bale Baron 5250 — a swath-to-bundle combo built for NZ conditions and serious about productivity

Picture this my machinery minded enthusiasts: the hay is down, you’ve convened with at least eight of your most trusted weather apps and out of nowhere the meteorologist are bandying their new favourite term – an ‘atmospheric river’. The rain is coming whether you like it or not, and you’re pondering whether your baler is going to spend the day making hay or making you cry.

Fear not my forage-loving friends; enter the Marcrest 210 high-capacity conventional baler, followed closely by the Bale Baron 5250, both looking like they’ve just come from a TED Talk on ‘How to Outperform Your Old Baling Gear and Look Good Doing It’. Buckle up, contractors, this is where the swath-to-bundle concept gives your productivity a much-needed caffeine hit.

Pickup

All capacious things start with a high-capacity intake and the 2.1m pick-up on the Marcrest 210 doesn’t nibble at the swath – it hoovers it up like a labrador at a kid’s sausage sizzle.

This labrador-like appetite comes not only from the width but also from the variable speed, 5 bar camless setup with plastic strippers for longevity. Thanks to the pickup being hydraulically driven, it is ground speed matched, so it isn’t a case of ‘the faster you go, the bigger the mess’. It’s completely daily maintenance free and complete with turnable pickup wheels.

In terms of the augers and rotors, it actually has two augers with different flighting patterns. In conjunction with the heavy-duty crop roller, this means that the row is flat and evenly distributed across the wide pick up before it enters the bale pre-chamber. Nice.

Driveline

Durability for high moisture New Zealand conditions is a given, thanks to the heavy-duty driveline. This is designed to laugh in the face of our four-seasons-in-one-hour weather. In terms of protection, there’s an auto reset driveline clutch on the flywheel, an auger clutch and an auto reset rotor clutch. To reset any of these, simply slow down the rpm and it will re-engage (thanks to the 172kg flywheel that gives it plenty of inertia).

Most of this is protected thanks to the fact that the pickup is hydraulically driven, which means you can simply reverse it if you get a blockage. It also has a spring-loaded drop floor, so you can drop the floor (from in the cab), re-engage the clutch and remove the blockage. If you get yourself in a real pickle, it also has a stuffer shear bolt.

Chamber

In terms of productivity of the machine, the flywheel creates enough punch for 120 strokes per minute to produce over 600, 12-flake, roughly 22kg bales per hour (significantly higher numbers are achieved with less flakes/lower bale weight parameters).

Smooth Bale Formation: Thanks to a refined plunger and pre-compression system that’s smoother than a Southland radio DJ, the Marcrest 210 delivers uniform, dense bales that’ll impress even the fussiest of horse owners.

Hydraulic Precision

With on-board hydraulics controlling pickup, the three-sided hydraulic bale chamber density (top and the two sides) is compressed by on-board hydraulics and also auto reversing knotter fans. Another benefit is no contamination in the system, as you simply need one hydraulic valve for the pickup lift/lower and you also have the pass-through hydraulic lines. These go through the machine in conjunction with the heavy duty draw bar for towing/running the Bale Baron.

Knotters

The baler itself uses three strings over the conventional two, significantly increasing the ability to have high density bales, which (among other benefits) is fantastic in terms of transport. As part of this a triple Rasspe knotter is used. Because this is tailless (thanks to not using a knife arm), this also means no plastic contamination in either the bales or the paddock. They are also self-threading, and due to there being three strings, this means if you drop one, you simply keep going and it will self-thread – genius. In terms of twine storage, the large swinging side panels allow for 21-twine spool storage.

In cab monitor

The Marcrest 210 baler needs to be thought of as a downsized medium square baler. It is five tonne in weight. It has the equivalent tech too: it measures the load on the rotor, the stuffer and the plunger, as well as having scales on the transition shoot, which feeds information straight back into the baler monitor.

This means you can also have the Baron 5250 bundler on the same monitor. This also gives you a clever bar graph on the monitor about the key parameters of both the baler and the Baron, as well as load on those key components. On the fly you can adjust bale flake number, and desired weight and length settings. It also gives output of bale weight, flake count, and bale length as well as total bale numbers per hour, and tons per hour.

Forget the days of ‘she’ll be right’ fixes with fencing wire and hope. The Marcrest 210 is bristling with tech, from real-time bale monitoring to camera functionality so you can see what is going on both with the baler, with the Bale Baron, or with both – from the split screen functionality.

Bale Baron 5250

Now, we all know that the hardest thing about baling isn’t the actual baling – it’s the faffing, stacking, and loading that comes after. Enter the Bale Baron 5250. This coupled with the Marcrest 210 provides a genuine swath-to-bundle automated bale collection operation. As the baler spits out bales, the Bale Baron gathers and bundles them in groups of
9, 18 or 21.

Summary

The Marcrest 210 and Bale Baron 5250 combo are a dream solution for our mixed bag of farm sizes, baling jobs, and weather tantrums. Whether you’re squeezing out the last window between showers or tackling rolling terrain, these machines bring serious grunt and reliability to the field.

Historically, the Bale Baron would outperform the balers. However these two machines are perfectly matched. The productivity gains going from two balers and then a second tractor running the Bale Baron to pick them up, compared to a single tractor, baler, Bale Baron in a convoy is a huge saving.

The Bale Baron’s sensors and fail-safes ensure accurate bundling, even if your apprentice is distracted by their phone. Plus, both machines play nicely together, cutting downtime and boosting output thanks to the integrated monitor. Test balers have done over 1,000,000 bales. This is the true commercial swath-to-bundle package. It’s the real deal folks.