Chaff Cutter Capacity Explained: How Many Kg/Hr Do You Need?

The Market Range, Roughly

Capacity scales with motor size and blade/feed design, though not in a perfectly straight line. Small hand-cranked and entry-level 1HP electric units typically fall around 400–700 kg/hr. Mid-size 2–3HP electric machines commonly sit somewhere in the 500–1,000 kg/hr range. Beyond that, you move into tractor-PTO-driven machines, which draw their power from a tractor rather than a motor and can cut several thousand kilograms per hour — built for gaushalas and large commercial dairies rather than a small family herd.

Where Our Two Machines Sit

The Gokul 15 Electric runs on a 2HP motor and is rated at 1,000 kg/hr — at the top end of what a machine this size typically manages, which comes down to the blade and feed-tray design rather than motor size alone (more on that in our guide on why the Gokul 15's 2HP motor is enough). For most single-farm and small-cooperative herds, that's comfortably enough to process a day's fodder in well under an hour.

The Gokul Tractor PTO is built for a different scale entirely — 6,000+ kg/hr, running off any 35 HP+ tractor with no separate motor needed. That's the right choice once you're feeding a genuinely large herd or a gaushala, where a smaller electric machine would need to run for hours to keep up.

Working Out What You Actually Need

Capacity only matters relative to how much fodder your herd eats and how long you want cutting to take. See our guide on how much fodder a cow eats per day for the real daily quantities, then multiply by your herd size to get a rough daily total. A 1,000 kg/hr machine, for instance, can chop a full day's fodder for a fairly large herd in a matter of minutes — most farms are nowhere near needing to run their machine for a full hour straight.

Rather than doing that math by hand, our chaff cutter calculator asks how many animals you have and how much you need to cut per hour, and gives you a direct recommendation between the two models.