VONDA, Sask. Ñ Before Bernie Denis switched to liquid fertilizer, he always had a seed truck and a fertilizer truck in the field at seeding time. Building an air cart that included a liquid fertilizer tank allowed him to consolidate his seeding equipment.
The next step was to streamline the trucking side.
However, now he needed to haul three products to the field: seed, dry fertilizer and liquid fertilizer. Denis accomplished this by modifying the front trailer from a Super-B. He removed the fifth-wheel plate from the back and mounted a liquid tank in its place. The tank sits on a little bed at the back of the trailer.
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“It’s a two-compartment grain trailer, so we can have the seed in the front and the dry fertilizer in the back, then the liquid fertilizer behind that,” he said.
“There’s about 600 bushels in the front hopper and 500 in the back, then the liquid tank holds 2,500 imperial gallons.”
For convenient unloading, he mounted six-inch augers on each hopper, driven by orbital motors. The auger inlets are built so they only cover part of the hopper.
“I noticed some other manufacturers have a rubber flap they pull off to unload into a grain elevator. I found that very slow. The auger only takes up half the slide on the grain trailer. If I open the trap wide open, it dumps straight out. If I’m going to the elevator, I don’t remove the augers. I just open the slide wide open.”
Denis mounted a hydraulic oil reservoir on the side of the truck frame, under the sleeper and behind the fuel tank. He runs hydraulic power back to the augers with splitter valves that control the augers. They’re set up to run separately or both at the same time.
“The pump is mounted directly onto the transmission. There was an output shaft on that truck when we bought it, so we found a pump that fit right on there. Inside the cab there’s a pto switch to turn it on or off.”
The augers are set up so Denis can fill seed with one compartment, then switch to fertilizer with the other one and not have to move the truck or the air cart auger. A two-inch Honda pump, mounted at the back of the B-train trailer, transfers liquid fertilizer both ways.
“That pump takes the fertilizer out of the storage tank in the farmyard and pumps it into the tank on the trailer. Then we switch the pipes around and pump it back into the air seeder tank.
“As soon as I park and start loading wheat, I connect the liquid fertilizer and start pumping it into the tank. That usually takes a little longer than the seed. By the time the seed is done, I can shut that off, move the auger away and the liquid fertilizer tank is full. You’ll get two fills, so probably a total of 160 acres, out of that trailer.”
Denis built the unload setup so he can leave the augers on the hopper slides year round.
“Come harvest time, if you’re not unloading with a swing auger, we’ll run the truck to the side of the auger and use the unloading augers instead of the hoppers underneath.”
Adding the augers didn’t cost much because it was mostly material he already had on the farm. While he spent only $1,500, including the pump on the truck, it was finicky work and took at least a couple of weeks.
“Since we did that, it’s been a blessing. Before, we were loading so much more often and we had two trucks in the field. Now, it’s a lot quicker and simpler to move vehicles to new fields.”
