Penzance, Sask. – Harvesting sunflowers can be an exercise in patience, according to one long-term grower. The oilseed has been grown on the Thorson farm near Penzance, Sask., for more than 30 years.
“My dad grew them in ’72 and we’ve grown them, off and on, ever since. I’ve been growing them fairly steady since the mid ’80s,” said Jim Thorson, a director of the Saskatchewan Sunflower Committee.
Thorson generally harvests his sunflowers before Christmas, although this year it might be February, and he has had situations when he had to combine in the spring.
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“It really depends on the growing season. In the years we didn’t get them off, you just couldn’t. They were too tough. We wait to get them drier, so we don’t have to aerate them as much or dry them with heat.”
Thorson said you can start combining when they get under 20 percent moisture.
“They’ll thresh properly, but you’ll need heated air drying. I took a lot off last year (2004) at 17 percent and though we did dry them with aeration, we had to move them. They wouldn’t dry down real well. If they’re under 15 percent, you can turn on the fan and they’ll dry down. That’s what we’re aiming at now and why we’re a little later. We’re waiting for that 15 percent,” said Thorson.
“Even in the winter, when it never gets above freezing, they seem to dry down with the fans running on them.”
Drying with heat is an option, but Thorson said the little hairs on the seeds are about as flammable as gasoline. Plus, being an oilseed, they contain up to 50 percent oil, so if a fire does start, it can cause a big fire.
“They’re very flammable. I have a neighbour who burned up a dryer. We’ve had fires in a batch dryer we had to keep putting out. We never did get any of the seed on fire, that’s why we were able to get it out. But if a dryer catches, usually there’s nothing left of it.”
Thorson said the potential for fire makes combine maintenance important. To start, he uses blowers to clean dust, chaff and straw off his combines.
“If you break a hydraulic hose, sometimes they can get dirty, make sure you clean that kind of stuff up, so there’s no oil-soaked dirt on it. You want to make sure before you do any sunflowers that you don’t have any spots like that on the combine that can add to the fire hazard,” he said.
“Although the dust is flammable, it doesn’t really burn a lot unless it’s got something else to burn. If your combine is clean, that dust won’t necessarily do damage. But it’s even worse in the spring because the sunflowers are drier.
“When you get a dry fall or you combine in the spring, dust just going by the exhaust manifold will land on the combine and start to smolder and glow. If you don’t have any other fuel there, that’s all that happens. But if there’s a lot of straw built up, it may get bigger.”
Thorson said at that point it’s generally too dry to combine properly anyway. You get too much stalk and head breakup, which is difficult to separate from the light sunflower seed. He tries to harvest when the humidity is higher.
“Sometimes you just go out in the morning, then quit when it gets hot and sunny.”
When it comes time to harvest in winter, Thorson offers a few suggestions to make the combines work properly in the cold.
“If you want to spend the money, there are light oils you can put in to make your hydraulics work better. But we prefer to put heaters on that we can plug in and warm up the oil before we start the combine,” he said.
“On the motor, you could put a heater on the oil pan, even if you have a block heater. We do that in our trucks, rather than change to a lighter oil. But with the combines, if it’s that cold, you don’t go out there anyway. We’ve been able to use the block heater on the motors, then put some heat to the hydraulic reservoirs to warm them up before we start.”
Pan heaters Thorson uses include magnetic units and strap-on pads. He’s even used battery blankets on smaller oil reservoirs.
“They’re just a heating element that you plug in, that vary from 200 to 500 watts. You clamp them to anything that’s steel and they heat up. You do have to be careful because they get hot enough that you don’t want to have anything flammable next to them.
“You can get magnet ones, which I find are a little lower wattage and they don’t heat up as much. But they work, depending on the size of tank and location. With the 500-watt clamp-on heaters, one is plenty big enough for anything you’d find on a combine.”
On his CaseIH 2388, Thorson has heaters on the main hydraulic oil reservoir, along with a remote hydraulic oil reservoir used specifically for the chaff spreader.
“I’ve had the experience where we weren’t heating (the chaff spreader) reservoir up and it wouldn’t run up to speed. It would start plugging the combine from the back end to the front.
“In the Massey, there’s one reservoir for the combine, but there’s another reservoir for the table, so we put heaters on both of them.”
Header modifications
The most common header modification is the addition of sunflower pans, which generally provide a 12 inch row spacing on the knife.
Thorson said the reel on some older combines will knock the sunflower heads over the back of the table. But newer combines, with variable-speed reels that can run slower, don’t throw much over the back.
On his Case combine, Thorson uses a pick-up reel and draper header.
“Other than putting the sunflower pans on the draper header, some years we tie core-plast across the fingers to make the pick-up fingers solid, so they’re more like a bat. This year we went without, ran the reel slow and it seemed to work. But we may still cover those fingers,” he said.
“In the past, when we used a normal header with an auger table, we’ll use the ordinary bat reel, but add a second bat, or make a bat out of plywood so it’s quite a bit wider. That does a better job of bringing (the heads) in than just a single bat.”
Thorson rebuilt a used sunflower reel from a different header, so it would fit his Massey combine.
“This reel is an 18-inch round drum and every foot it has one-inch wide flat-iron (fingers) sticking out nine inches. (The fingers) come down between the pans and brush the material back over the knife.
“The whole idea of the drum is that it pushes the plant down so you don’t get too much plant material into the combine. If a head gets stuck between the pans, or as the stems flow through, those iron pieces keep the material moving.”
Thorson mounted the sunflower reel back on his header, so the flat-iron fingers come quite close to the knife to keep it clean and clear.
“Ideally, I’d like them clearing the pan hold-downs about a half an inch, which would be about an inch above the knife. They actually dip down in front of the knife, which keeps it clean and stops anything from wedging in there.”
The sunflower reel uses a mechanical drive off the orbital motor that drives the original reel on the header. Thorson built his own dividers for each end.
“They’re a good idea. When you don’t have them, like on the other combine, the sunflowers will hang up and get pulled out of the ground, so there’s a bit of a loss. The dividers do split the sunflowers off and leave them standing.”
It takes about an hour to switch the reels on the Massey, plus two hours to put the pans on each header, so he can have his combines ready to go in an afternoon.
The only other change he makes is adding tarps on the hoppers. “Wind will blow the sunflower seed out of the hopper because it’s so light. And the tarp keeps the snow out, which solves a lot of problems with ice getting into your hopper.”
