Hay flipper

A novel device for helping farmers to dry out hay more quickly has won a Glasgow University graduate a prestigious design award.

Gavin Armstrong, 23, from Kippen, Stirlingshire, scooped the Glasgow 1999 Design Medal for his design for a swath inverter – a device for flipping over a hay crop to help dry out the damp underside. Dry hay is an essential farmyard food source for sheep and cows.

Armstrong came up with the design as part of his Product Design Engineering degree course, run in conjunction with the Glasgow School of Art.

He built a working prototype of the device, which is powered and towed by a tractor and uses a pair of parallel belts to invert the swath. The rollers are driven from one hydraulic motor and are geared so as to spin at the same speed and in opposite directions, ensuring that the touching inner two faces of the belt that perform the inversion move rearwards at the same speed.