Operators spend real time tweaking ration formulas, adjusting load order, and hunting for answers when a batch comes out uneven. The hay stays in clumps. The cycle drags. The cows sort. Most of the time, the formula is not the problem. The kicker is.
The auger kicker sits at the outer, lower leading edge of the vertical auger. It goes by several names depending on who built your machine: kicker plate, leading edge plate, lead-edge scraper, plow wing, scraper. Different labels, same job. It is the single component most responsible for whether feed moves or stagnates inside the tub.
How the Rolling Boil Works
A functioning kicker creates what is best described as a rolling boil inside the mixer. Feed gets scraped off the wall, swept toward the auger, lifted up through the centre column, and cascades back outward and down the wall before being pulled back into the cutting zone. That cycle repeats continuously through the mix. The whole tub participates.
Without a working kicker, that flow pattern collapses. Feed packs against the wall. Dead zones form where material barely moves regardless of how long the auger turns. You can run the machine far longer than you should and still pull a batch that has not mixed properly, because the problem is flow, not time.
A worn kicker is even more deceptive than a missing one. The machine looks functional. The auger turns. But wall movement has degraded, and the dead spots are invisible until the feed bunk tells you something is wrong.
The Auger Kicker Decides More Than Mix Quality
Flow efficiency and power draw are directly connected. When a kicker is doing its job, material moves freely, the auger encounters less resistance, and torque demand on the tractor drops. When the kicker is worn or sized wrong, the auger works harder to produce worse results. That means more fuel burned per batch, more hours on the tractor, and more wear distributed across the drivetrain.
Multiply that across a full season of daily mixing and the cost gap between a maintained kicker and a neglected one becomes significant. This is not a minor wear item to defer. It is a component that affects nearly every operating metric the machine has.
Clean-out speed also suffers without a functioning kicker. Material lifted up the centre and cascaded outward clears the tub efficiently. Without that movement, residue packs at the base and along the walls, extending clean-out time and leaving carry-over between batches.
Sizing the Kicker to the Ration
Not every ration needs the same kicker. LEO Agriculture’s bolt-on system offers four sizes: Small, Medium, Large, and Extreme. Each one is matched to a different material density and ration type, and choosing the right one matters as much as having one at all.
High-hay rations need a larger kicker. Dry, fibrous material is harder to sweep and tends to pack. A more aggressive kicker keeps it moving and cuts cycle time. Wet rations work better with a smaller kicker. High-moisture material moves more easily on its own, and an oversized kicker in that environment creates too much agitation rather than too little.
The Extreme size adds a lip designed for light-density material that would otherwise float rather than circulate. It is a specific solution for a specific problem, not a default option.
Being able to swap kicker sizes as rations change through the season is the practical value of the bolt-on design. The wear item is replaced on its own without pulling components that still have service life left. If the kicker is integral to the auger rather than a separate bolt-on part, that flexibility disappears.
Knife Placement and Pressure Zones Work Alongside the Kicker
The kicker handles wall-side flow. The pressure zones inside the tub handle cutting and processing. These two systems interact, and understanding both helps operators get the most out of a machine.
The highest pressure sits closest to the bottom of the tub. That is where roughage gets processed fastest. The middle zone is where mixing is most complete. The top of the shell is primarily a transfer zone, moving material back into the column. Getting roughage down into the lower zones quickly is what shortens processing time, which is why load order matters and why the kicker’s ability to keep material circulating rather than sitting on the wall has a direct effect on how fast the high-pressure zone can do its work.
Knife placement follows a similar logic. Pre-chopped roughage typically runs a large knife on top. Round bales and longer-stem material need room to drop into the cutting zone, so a smaller top knife is generally the right call. Running a large top knife with round bales can cause spilling. These are not rigid rules but starting points; experienced operators adjust as they learn their specific rations.
What to Check and When
A kicker does not fail suddenly in most cases. It wears gradually, which means performance degrades in a way that is easy to attribute to other causes: a different batch of hay, weather affecting forage moisture, herd intake variation. Checking kicker condition regularly, rather than waiting for obvious failure, keeps the degradation from accumulating into a real problem.
Signs worth paying attention to: mix cycles running noticeably longer than usual, feed sorting at the bunk on batches that should be uniform, and increased tractor load during mixing. Any one of those on its own could be something else. All three together usually points back to flow, and flow points back to the kicker.
The bolt-on four-size system on the LEO Agriculture VT and HD Series machines is designed around this maintenance reality. Replacing a worn kicker is a straightforward job. The harder part is recognising when it needs doing before the feed bunk gives you the answer.
