On the 18th of September BCG hosted a GRDC Harvester Set-Up Workshop in Hopetoun and another in St Arnaud on the 19th, attracting over 65 growers to each event.
Attendees travelled from across Victoria to learn about improving harvester capacity and efficiency, reducing and measuring harvester losses, integrating harvest weed seed control options, productivity and economics, harvester fire minimisations and on-farm grain storage.
Expert presenters included Ben White of Kondinin Group, Peter Broley of Primary Sales, Chris Warrick of Stored Grain, and independent harvest specialists Murray Skayman (international), Brett Asphar and Kassie van der Westerhuizen.
Value for every grower
The harvester set-up workshops are a free event open to all, primarily targeting growers, contractors and farmhands who will be operating harvesters in the upcoming season.
The workshops aim to integrate timely and seasonal information to ensure growers are well equipped for the upcoming harvest.
Peter Broley, the Chief Executive of project lead organisation Primary Sales stated that: “Each workshop is the start of a conversation to help growers improve their productivity at harvest. Growers talk about their crops and the conditions they face and receive input on what they could look to change and their settings to start with given the year ahead.”
Traynor’s Lagoon grower and site host of the St Arnaud workshop, Colin Coates, emphasised the value of the workshops to any individual with any model of harvester: “I have a feeling that people think it’s mainly for newer model headers, but it covers all models and how to set them up and can relate to any age machinery or model. I recommend the workshop to everyone who has a harvester, it doesn’t matter what age.”
Mr Broley supported this notion by noting that the GRDC Harvester Set-Up Workshops are “header-set up for the ‘colour-blind’, incorporating practical hands-on experience of how to change the machine mechanically to improve harvester productivity for all ages and classes of machine”.
Harvest losses a key message
Harvest losses, including how to minimise and to measure them, were a key message for growers who attended the workshop.
Research stemming from the GRDC funded project Measuring Harvest Losses found growers left an estimated $320 million of grain in paddocks from front and other machine losses in cereal, canola and grain legumes in Western Australian alone.
When St Arnaud grower Jack Gould was asked what information he would be taking away, he replied: “checking what harvesters are doing more, a lot more measuring with drop pans and checking what is happening out the back of the header [to minimise harvest losses] and quantifying what is happening”.
Similarly, St Arnaud grower Luke Batters said the day was highly informative and said that in future, he would be “checking that the guts of the header are calibrated appropriately, the concaves are set-up square to the rotor… and then starting to measure harvest losses to hopefully increase productivity”.
To learn more about measuring your harvest losses, read this 3-minute article from BCG, or watch this video featuring Peter Broley of Primary Sales.
Additional resources from the GRDC Harvester Set-Up Clinics:
GRDC’s Back Pocket Guide to Reducing Harvest Fires
GRDC’s Farm Business Fact Sheet- Investment in Harvest Machinery
This project is funded by the Grains Research and Development Corporation.
