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WSPA-CAMDA I.C. MOWER PROJECT |
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| CAMDA has long had a Grass Cutting Equipment (GCE) Project, making available horse or tractor-drawn rigs
to herder communities, to speed up their hay-making in a typically short Mongolian summer. Many herders were only equipped with laboriously slow sickles and
scythes, unable to produce sufficient hay to last a long or harsh winter. Horse-drawn rigs - Chinese or Russian - greatly speeded this work to yield a good-sized
hay crop but these often needed two sturdy well-built horses for the work, the rigs being too heavy for the small, typical Mongolian horse.
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| When in 2005 we learned of a semi-motorised light-weight mower being developed by students at London
Imperial College (Developing Technologies) for use in Romania, its potential benefits to Mongolian pastoralists led us to investigate the possibility of a model
being developed to suit the Mongolian terrain. At this time WSPA were supporting our vet aid project, and their regular visits to monitor these made them aware of
the limitations the herders faced in producing enough hay for horse and general animal fodder. On learning of the Imperial College venture, Alistair (Ali) Findlay
of WSPA managed to get a budget for a protype model, based on the College's model (right), to be made in Mongolia.
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In the autumn of 2006, the Mongolian-made prototype began its trials, supervised by Ali. Compared with tractor-drawn cutting equipment it fared very favourably, being pulled by just one small horse. The Mongolian tester, used to heavy equipment or tractor-drawn cutters remarked how easily it operated, commenting that it cut wet grass better than the other machines. However, the prototype wasn't without fault, due to a vibration problem, but this was overcome. WSPA then granted the production of 4 or 5 more - the first of their kind ever to have been made in Mongolia - and a small manufacturing unit is currently in the process of completing this work. |
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In funding this project, WSPA demonstrated their flexible and far-sighted approach towards animal welfare. With ever increasing changes in global weather, the Mongolian climate too is changing. The disastrous dzuds of 1999/2002 tended to be cyclic, with intervals of around 10 years, but future weather patterns may become less predictable. This WSPA-funded project could become the basis for a valuable home-produced tool in the coming years enabling herders to obtain improved hay crops that will better see them through severe or prolonged winters. |
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The pictures show the older 2-horse type rigs, UK trials of the original Imperial College mower, and later trials in Mongolia of both the UK model,
which we shipped out to Mongolia for a copy to be made there, and the "Made in Mongolia" prototype. |
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