PROTECTION THAT PUTS YOU IN CONTROL

As your operation grows, so do the challenges. More grain, less labor and tighter margins. Yet, every year, you meet the challenge and earn a harvest. GSI helps you protect it. Learn more at grainsystems.com tubing sizes, different airlock distributions and motors with various levels of horsepower that can create an efficient system for any setup.

Arie Koster farms south of Carman, Man., and has been using a pneumatic system since 2020. At the best of times, he only has himself, his wife and his father, with a hired hand intermittently working on the farm. He can’t waste time and energy having someone constantly monitoring the dryer and moving augers to move freshly dried corn. He needs to know he can drop his truck load and head back out to the field for another.

Installing a pneumatic system was an easy decision, he says.

“It was the most cost-effective and simple system.... It’s simple, easy to use and it works the way it should.”

With a small corn operation, Koster currently has five bins set up flowing out of his grain dryer with room to double that when he starts planting more acres.

A custom-made system

Wentworth Ag in southern Manitoba sells GSI products across Western Canada. Derek Holenski does everything from sales and quoting to designing grain handling systems for clients.

“It can be as simple as just drawing a couple of circles for a guy and telling him that’s where his bins should go, or the full-scale set of construction drawings for a multimillion-dollar grain elevator facility,” he says. It’s important to consider what clients need now, and how their systems might evolve over time.

In late winter, Holenski was busy selling and quoting farmers on new or improved systems. Farmers were looking forward to getting their new systems ready for harvest. That can be stressful with a short construction window.

“Once (the installer) is there and he’s doing the installs and he’s going through it with them, they kind of relax and they get kind of excited about it again and realize that they don’t have to use augers and trucks to move their grain once it’s dried.”

The most typical grain handling operation is one that connects the bins right from a drying system, like Koster’s system. Holenski sees farmers include a pneumatic system with their brand-new dryers or improve the system they already have with a new pneumatic setup.

There have been no limits to what a pneumatic system can handle, Holenski says. He has seen every conceivable crop moved through a pneumatic system as long as the system is used correctly. He has even seen a plastic manufacturer in Winnipeg use a pneumatic system to move plastic pellets throughout their operation. Since plastic doesn’t move the same as grain within the bin, they had to add some vibrators to shake the bin to get the pellets moving. Once it was in the airlock, there was no problem getting the product through the system, Holenski says.

Although there are no limits to the potential benefits of a pneumatic system, Holenski says, the system does have to match the farmer’s handling needs to justify the cost. For a farmer with only five or 10 5,000-bushels bins, he says, “they might not think that that’s worth the price. If they’ve got six 30,000-bushel bins, then that really starts to look like an attractive option.”

Because no two farm sites are the same, there’s no way to measure how much farmers with pneumatic systems are saving on the input costs and man-hours that they aren’t putting into moving grain. Holenski says the farmers he talks to say they are seeing their systems pay for themselves in a matter of years. However, the system provides benefits beyond the financial value. The biggest selling point for Koster is that the system really saves time on the farm.

When farmers can move grain by flipping a switch instead of physically moving an auger into place when they’d rather be fixing equipment or getting the combine back into the field, it is hard to put a tangible value on that the time savings, Holenski says.

“Most guys see that return pretty quickly.”