How to farm 35,000 acres with no grain dryer
BY RON LYSENG WINNIPEG BUREAU
Why buy it if it’s not needed?
Randy Johner farms 35,000 acres in southeastern Saskatchewan without a dryer or pneumatic system.He manages with 42 bins and seven burners plus augers and trucks to condition tough grain.
It’s not that Johner has anything against dryers; it’s just that he’s been able to get along without by closely monitoring heat and moisture in the bins. He manually employs augers and trucks to turn grain as needed. Total bin capacity is about two million bushels and every one of the bins has a fan.
Is a system without a dryer convenient or efficient? Maybe not as much as it could be, but it works and it keeps the cost per bushel low. And in his corner of the world, high moisture at harvest is rare.
The layout was developed by Wall Grain. The plan includes provisions for the eventual addition of a dryer and pneumatic grain movement.
Wall recommended all basic infrastructure be put into place when they began building the system so eventually adding the dryer and Walinga would be simplified.
“Where we farm, here in the south, we get a little longer growing season, so the crop is more mature at harvest,” Johner said in a phone interview last week. “We don’t deal with as much moisture as guys further north. And we seldom see a wet harvest. So, we’ve been getting by with aeration fans. Seven of the bins have propane heaters.
“We put the toughest grain in those seven bins. Remember 2019 when we had rain for three months? We call it the harvest from hell. That’s the year we installed the heaters. We kept turning the grain over into dry bins with the fans on.We don’t have a grain leg or anything like that. We’ve never felt that was really a necessity. We auger into trucks and turn it that way.”
Asked if the setup with burners and turning had ever backfired, Johner laughed, “Oh yeah, we’ve learned our lesson the hard way a few times. It wasn’t the bins’ fault or the planning. We had to take full responsibility.”
Johner does have a bin monitoring system from Wall Grain. The sensors report to a person in Calgary, who keeps track of monitoring systems across Western Canada.He emphasizes that there’s a live person at the other end of the wire, not just a robot.
The person remotely controls fans and burners in accordance with bin conditions and readings from the on-farm weather station, which tracks temperature and humidity. If he sees three bins that are dry, but they’re too hot, he’ll turn on the blower when the humidity is higher and the temperature cooler.
“Running all those fans, we need three-phase power. Luckily, we have three-phase right across the road from our bins. We have five different power accounts for all those fans. Three-phase is cheaper to run than single phase.
“We’ve toyed with buying a dryer for quite a few years. Usually, it’s dry enough we don’t need one.
Then we got into a few wet harvests, so we considered it again. Maybe, as the farm gets bigger, we’ll someday need it. The plans are all there from Wall Grain ready to go. Even Dave (Wall) said we didn’t need to spend the money. I’ve been dealing with Dave for 30 years. I bought my first bins from him.”
Johner says if a farmer planned on doing a lot of grain drying, he’d want the dryer set up in the middle of the bins so he could easily keep circulating until everything was at a safe temperature and moisture content. But there’s a limit to how far you can stretch one grain-handling facility. He started with a single row of bins. Now he has five rows and he admits he should have started long-term planning earlier.
“We can reach some of the bins with a leg. That’s a start. But we can’t reach the farthest. We didn’t begin planning early enough to tie them all together now, and that’s really what you want. But we can still service those farther bins with an auger and a truck or maybe just a couple augers. But there’s an ongoing cost with augers also.
“We wear out three big augers every couple years. Completely worn out. Now, if we had a leg or Walinga, we’d still be wearing out components and spending more money with Dave. If we move ahead on this, I think the Walinga is the way to go. Running grain through any machine wears out the machine.”
Wall Grain engineer Tony Ferrigno says the dryer being contemplated by Dave and Johner is probably the Mathews ECO. Many dryers are so tall they require a leg system.Ferrigno says that ECO, with 15-foot overall height, is a low-
profile unit that can be filled with an auger. Since Johner is already set up for augers and isn’t keen on buying a leg, the ECO makes since.
“This is a screened-type dryer with the 14-inch-thick columns,”Ferrigno says. “The grain flows through these screens. Some guys don’t like cleaning screens, so they want a mixed-flow dryer. Mixedflow is better if you’re doing corn but screened-type can do any kind of crop. If you’re like Johner and you’re not drying grain every year, I’d say the ECO is more of a budgetminded dryer.” ron.lyseng@producer.com