INNOVATION
Adding value through energy By Cheyenne Nicholson
The electric revolution could soon include farm machinery leading to greater savings for farmers.
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ach year 52 million tonnes of carbon is produced by agricultural machinery. Our reliance on fossil fuels to grow and produce our food is significant and provides challenges both to the day-today running costs for food producers and greenhouse gas emissions. One New Zealand company is out to help change all that with the power of electricity. Loxley Innovations is a Christchurchbased company looking to create and produce electric tractors. Founder Duncan Aitken says that opportunities for electric tractors run beyond fuel savings. “It’s looking at things in the long-term view. What we are creating is an electric tractor that runs off and can produce electricity. Having that ability to generate electricity to then feed back to your house or farm infrastructure can improve the farm’s resilience.” The initial idea for the venture started on Aitken’s Christchurch lifestyle block. Needing to get on top of grass growth on the block, he invested in a rideon lawnmower but found the user experience lacking and the ongoing costs undesirable. “I used it a lot on-farm, but figured there had to be a better way of doing it. I had a look at electric alternatives, but there weren’t any that were cost-effective for me. So I converted an old ride-on lawnmower with a broken engine to battery electric,” he says. The conversion took a few months while Aitken navigated a full-time job and learned how to convert diesel to electric. “I hadn’t really had much experience with that sort of thing, but I thought ‘Oh I’ll just give it a crack’. I found it really interesting, and it came quite naturally. There are a lot of resources out there
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Loxley Innovations founded by Duncan Aitken, is a Christchurch-based company looking to create and produce electric tractors. Duncan test drives an electric tractor. so you can teach yourself practically anything these days,” he says. The converted lawnmower provided a quieter ride and fewer maintenance costs. But with 10 acres to maintain, he quickly realised he needed something bigger. His search for an electric tractor began, but he was left wanting again. So naturally, he converted his own. He created a 48-volt system, which is one where the tractor can be used to support their home power usage and potentially feed into the PowerGrid when the prices are right. “One day the prices weren’t favourable to feed back into the grid, we weren’t getting enough solar power generated and I wanted to cook dinner. I was able to use the battery in the tractor to feed back into the house network to power the oven to cook dinner,” he says. Seven years after tinkering in his shed making his own electric tractor, Aitken
decided the conditions and landscape were finally right to turn his idea for electric tractors into something tangible. “Five years ago when I first wanted to start doing this, the landscape wasn’t quite right. Now with electric cars becoming increasingly popular, more will follow, like tractors. The designs and ideas we have for them aren’t the same as what I made in my shed, that was more proof of concept,” he says. The team are looking to build a tractor that is fully optimised for efficiency, doing away with as many of the complex transmission parts as possible in order to keep maintenance costs low and upfront costs viable. Loxley isn’t just about building a neat electric tractor, but looking at the bigger picture of energy use on-farm and the potential for optimisation for the whole farm system. Being able to cook dinner with his homebuilt converted tractor was
DAIRY FARMER
June 2022
