Authored by: Tractor tyre expert | 23 January 2025
Your choice of tyre is not just a question of size or price. It’s a strategic decision on how to optimise yields, protect your crops or reduce your working time. Wide tyres, which are perfect for ploughing, reach their limit when it comes to passing between fragile rows of young seedlings. On the other hand, narrow tyres offer a precise solution, but only if they include advanced technologies such as the steel belt.
This innovation reinforces the structure of the tyre, allowing it to carry very heavy loads while protecting your seedbeds. It is based on a smart design that combines sturdiness and flexibility, offering better stability and a significant reduction of the tyre’s impact on your crops. With narrow tyres equipped with steel belts, you will therefore improve your efficiency, reduce costs linked to any drop in yields and avoid rapid tyre wear.
This article invites you to explore the practical benefits of narrow tyres made with steel belt technology, which takes account of actual circumstances in the field and specific start-of-season activities such as sowing or spraying.
Agricultural tyre design has evolved over time to meet the specific needs of precision farming. A classical tyre structure includes a casing, a tread, stabilising plies or layers (interlayers between the casing and the tread) and sidewalls, but for certain more high-tech models, you may find additional major innovations, such as the steel belt.
Standard tyres, which are often wide, are designed to increase the contact patch with the ground in order to provide better traction on soft soil. Yet when it comes to working with young, fragile seedlings, their width and their soil footprint can cause considerable damage. Soil compaction, squashed seedlings and the formation of ruts are just some of the negative consequences of using wide tyres in these particular conditions. In these circumstances, narrow tyres are the best way to avoid destroying part of your work.
The steel belt was developed and integrated into the structure of the tyre to offer several advantages:
The steel belt brings with it many advantages, but it is not suitable for all types of tyre. The stiffness caused by the steel can be a disadvantage in certain situations. For example, for wider tyres destined for field crop farming and designed to work at low pressure, suppleness is an essential quality. These tyre models are generally reinforced by layers of fabric which offer greater flexibility than steel. In this case, the steel belt is not necessary.
Narrow agricultural tyres equipped with a steel belt offer many advantages for farmers, in particular during spraying operations. They have to cope with heavy cyclic loads over an extremely limited surface area, while avoiding damaging the young seedlings. The steel belt is therefore particularly well suited to this type of tyre. This innovative technology allows you to optimise performance levels while protecting your crops and your soil.
One of the main benefits of narrow tyres is their ability to pass between the rows of crops without damaging them. Unlike wide tyres which will squash the young seedlings, narrow tyres considerably reduce the impact to the crops.
Thanks to its rigidity, the steel belt allows the tyre to carry very heavy loads without distorting, despite the ground’s much reduced load bearing capacity.
The steel belt ensures better stability and greater resilience during spraying with very wide spray booms.
It makes it possible to cope with higher pressure without the risk of distortion. This increases your tractor’s load capacity: ideal for carrying the weight of the tanks and the longest possible spray booms.
On this type of high-tech tyre, the combination of Dual Angle lugs and the steel belt improve the handling ability and stability of the tractor. The tread, fully supported by the steel belt, remains in close contact with the ground.
This ingenious design helps improve grip, with the lugs offering excellent traction while the steel belt reduces vibrations and deformation of the tyre, acting as a shock absorber and increasing the stability of the booms.
The steel belt makes it possible to have more even wear to the tread. It extends the tyre’s wear life and reduces replacement costs.
Thanks to its reinforced structure, an agricultural tyre equipped with a steel belt is more resistant to shocks and cuts, which makes the tyre more durable.
By choosing a narrow tyre with a steel belt, you make an investment which will allow you to reduce the frequency of your tyre replacements, and as such, your long-term operating costs.
Firestone’s Performer 95 agricultural tyre has become a benchmark in the field of spraying. Thanks to its innovative design and its exceptional performance levels, it is an ideal way to optimise your operations and protect your crops.
Narrow tyres equipped with a steel belt have become the must-have solution for spraying operations, for example. This technology, far from just offering a certain level of reinforcement, brings major benefits:
Investing in narrow tyres equipped with a steel belt is therefore a step towards more productive farming. Your choice of tractor tyres is clearly a strategic decision that has a direct impact on the productivity and profitability of your farm. When you buy high-tech tyres such as the Performer 95, you are choosing performance, durability and crop preservation.
With Firestone, you have the guarantee of tractor tyres that deliver a real advantage, and that in choosing our brand, you can work worry-free.
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