By Angela Lovell
Harvest time in northern Alberta’s Athabasca County can be challenging, especially in the area near the village of Boyle, where third-generation farmer Joe Rosich tends to approximately 3,000 acres of grains and oilseeds. While most Prairie farmers have been worrying about a lack of moisture over the past few years, Rosich has had the opposite problem.
“In four out of the last 10 years, we have had extreme amounts of rainfall that really impacted the crops, and in many of the other years, we have had wet falls with challenging conditions,” Rosich says.
But it was after a particularly gruelling harvest in 2016 – when he had to fight to get his crops off, then struggled to push the grain through a rickety old dryer, and augered each batch up to seven times in and out of the wet and dry bins and back into storage – that he made up his mind. He needed an upgrade to his grain handling system to be more efficient and make harvest less stressful.
Knowing what he wanted
Factoring in that decision was the farm’s expansion. It had doubled in size, and Rosich knew what he needed – a drying and handling system that could keep up with the increased production coming off the combine, similar to something he had seen at a neighbour’s yard a few years earlier.
“His system was set up with an auger on a swivel so it could reach a number of bins and he told me that he could pretty much finish drying about the same day he finished combining,” Rosich says. “It was completely different to how we were set up at the time. We would combine a whole bunch of grain, and then once we were done, we started drying and would end up with grain heating in the bins, and by then it was November and cold, and it got hard to dry. Having a system that would efficiently keep up with combines sounded like a dream, and from that point, meeting that goal of being able to shut down the dryer about the same time we shut down the combines was the inspiration for this whole system.”
Deciding on a pneumatic conveying system
After comparing different systems, including expensive overhead leg conveyors, Rosich toured a few farms that had installed pneumatic conveying systems, and he finally decided on one manufactured by Walinga called the Ultra-Veyor with Smart-Flo.
“We chose the Walinga system because I was impressed with the type of control they have that adjusts the speed of the system up or down based on the volume of grains,” Rosich says. “It’s a relatively cost-effective system that has gone a long way to solving some of the problems we have on the farm with tough grain. It’s not a big, elaborate system, but it still does the things that we want it to do for us on our farm and it’s easy to service.”
The system that connects to the grain dryer has three major components. First, a blower that compresses the air and forces it through the line at a certain rate of cubic feet per metre (CFM), depending on the size of the line, the distance it is moving and the type of grain. Second, an air lock meters the grain into the line at controlled speeds. Third, the Smart-Flo controller (the brain of the system) uses sensor technology to measure how much grain is going in and automatically varies the speed of the air flow to cause the least damage to the grain while using the least amount of energy. All the bins in the yard are connected by piping to the dryer and managed by the Ultra-Veyor Smart-Flo system.
The system can be configured in two ways, says Walinga representative Aren Vreugdenhil. It can either take the grain straight off the dryer (like Rosich’s system) or it can direct the grain into a surge bin, then blow it to wherever the farmer wants it to end up. It can be designed to work with any type or size of dryer.
“A farmer can start anywhere, but if they start with which dryer they want to buy, we can match our air system to it,” says Vreugdenhil. “It’s always easier to plan like that but we often get yards where they already have a dryer and we can work with whatever the farmer has.”
Designed to meet the needs of the farm
As each system can be customized to the needs of the farm, it can be reconfigured to fit any farmyard and can be added to over time to accommodate expansion. Rosich installed the system in 2019 on three bins, adding another couple in 2021 and two more last fall, so that he now has around 100,000 bushels of dry bin space connected to the dryer.
Rosich easily installed the Walinga system himself, but if he has one piece of advice for anyone considering a similar system, it’s to budget a portable telescopic boom lift into the overall cost.
“A farmer with a boom can basically install the system themselves and most importantly service it as well, and in a cost-effective manner, for pennies on the dollar compared to a big leg conveyor system,” Rosich says. “It would be hard to install the system on a bigger bin without something like that, and it’s handy to have it around the farm. It’s been a good addition and is useful for so many jobs.”
According to Rosich, it’s been a good investment overall. “Having the whole system – the dryer and the handling system – and using it aggressively as we have, has made the difference between being able to sleep at night during harvest,” he says. “It is the difference between having a plan and an effective way of getting the job done as opposed to hoping you just get dry weather, and if you don’t you are hooped. We have expanded significantly over the last few years, and to make the payments we need to be able to get that crop off. It has allowed us to stabilize and dramatically improve the chances of getting through harvest without too much drama.”
Although Rosich hasn’t worked out the return on investment of the system, he knows it has paid for itself in many ways.
“In my area, where we have a lot of moisture, the peace of mind it gives is priceless,” he says. “It has probably paid for itself several times over in terms of crop that we could get off. I have no problem justifying the investment. The cost of the components are not that expensive compared to a lot of other things we do on the farm and it just increases the capacity of everything else so much. Without the handling system, it would take almost one more full-time employee at harvest just trucking and managing that grain back and forth so we can look at it that way, too.”
Vreugdenhil says farmers tell him that they like the system because it’s user friendly and easy to maintain, and they don’t have to worry about physically moving grain anymore because the system does it all for them.