Belgian specialist Hyler is scaling up flax harvesting with the Falcon FS40, a new four-row machine designed to increase field capacity while preserving the long stems required for high-quality fibre production. With a working width of 5.20 metres, the FS40 simultaneously pulls four rows of flax from the soil rather than cutting the crop, keeping the plants ordered and parallel as they move through the machine before being laid evenly back onto the field. Hyler describes the platform as the world’s first four-row self-propelled flax puller, with working capacity approximately twice that of conventional machines.
Power comes from a 10.8-litre six-cylinder Volvo Penta D11 Stage V engine producing 420 hp, while Hyler quotes fuel consumption of 14–18 litres per hour. A patented pendulum axle is designed to control lateral machine movement and assist swath formation while improving weight distribution and stability on sloping terrain. Trimble GFX-750 provides the navigation interface, adding established precision guidance technology to a machine operating in one of agriculture’s most specialized harvesting segments.
The Falcon FS40 also signals an important step in Hyler’s industrial development. The company already produces specialized equipment for flax and hemp, including its Sativa self-propelled harvesting platform, but the four-row Falcon pushes the concept toward substantially higher harvesting capacity. Development included commercial-field testing with French flax specialist Groupe Depestele, suggesting that the project is moving beyond prototype engineering toward machinery designed around the throughput requirements of professional flax production.
Bottom Line: The Falcon FS40 is highly specialized, but that is precisely what makes it interesting. Hyler is applying higher capacity and self-propelled architecture to a crop where harvesting quality directly affects fibre value. The move from two-row solutions toward a 5.20-metre four-row platform suggests that specialty-crop mechanization is following the same productivity logic seen in mainstream harvesting: fewer passes, greater throughput and increasing machine specialization.
To dive deeper: https://agrotimes.ua/tehnika/hyler-predstavyla-samohidnyj-lonozbyralnyj-agregat/
