How brush cutters are used

Since we don’t use pesticides, the farm relies on 2 GX35 Honda brush cutters to keep grasses in check on our initial 1Ha of banana / coffee. It is time consuming but the Department of Agriculture recommended this method since the cogon grass after several cuttings will exhaust itself and stop growing.

The vegetation around the banana are mung beans which are nitrogen fixers.

Recently this unit stopped running.

Oil was not a problem and tuning did not help. It was taken to a local mechanic and then the dealership and both indicated the piston should be replaced. This is an older unit with a 40mm piston and neither had the part in stock.

The piston and rings were replaced but the unit still did not run.

Our worker noted there was a large gap between parts on the crankshaft.

A new crankshaft seems to have an extra bushing or washer.

With the new crankshaft, the unit is working well again.

The crankshaft is almost 2x more expensive in the US compared to Shopee.

Reflections / Improvements

It is great to see the team repair the unit, increasing farm capabilities, saving time and money.

Extra parts, tools and materials were ordered so downtime will be less next time.

Outside of the farm tricycle which gets 22km/l these are probably the largest direct CO2 emitters. In the last 19 days in Oct, we purchased 2.73 liters of gasoline for the brush cutters and 8.65 liters to fill the tricycle.

To reduce grass cutting efforts going forward, we will experiment with transitioning grasses to coffee growing areas.