It may not be love at first sight when farmers lay eyes on the McLeod Harvest Method.
The prototype shares little of the muscle that lures farmers and their lines of credit to the combine.
Bob McLeod, a Winnipeg entrepreneur, has spent three years developing a new system to take grain, chaff and weed seeds off the field.
He admits it’s not yet friendly to look at, but he believes farmers will see the beauty of the machine when they learn how it can make them more money.
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McLeod’s system separates the threshing and cleaning components of the combine into separate machines.
A field unit takes the grain, chaff and weed seeds off the field, leaving the straw behind. McLeod calls the mixture “graff.”
A prototype of the harvester is not yet built, but McLeod envisions it will have a header similar to a combine, with a bin about four times larger so it can handle more material and need emptying less often.
A 24-inch auger would empty the graff into a truck. McLeod thinks the truck would be most efficient if the box was a couple of feet higher, and if the tailgate swung open to dump the graff out.
In his tests so far, farmers have collected graff by taking the sieves out of their combines and turning off the aspirator.
A truck hauls the graff to the farmyard, where it goes through the cleaning mill.
About five metres high and six metres long, the mill runs off 220-volt power common to most farmyards.
Cheap to run
The prototype uses an energy efficient 20-horsepower motor. Manitoba Hydro tests show it costs 75 cents an hour to run.
“Even this year, as rudimentary as this machine is now, we’ve been keeping up to the farmer bringing in truckloads of the crops,” McLeod said.
The graff is fed into the top of the machine where the grain falls straight down. Chaff and lighter material are blown away.
The grain goes through screens, where it is cleaned to export standards.
The dockage separated by the screens joins the chaff and weed seeds, which are put through a roller mill and made into livestock feed. McLeod calls this material “savings” because usually it is left behind in fields.
From research and tests at the universities of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, McLeod has discovered his system collects 400 to 500 pounds of savings per acre.
As feed, it is worth $18 to $22 per acre. The value of taking weed seeds off the field is at least $6 per acre.
While the system is still in the research phase, McLeod estimates it would cost a farmer about $150,000 to buy.
When Karin Wittenberg, a ruminant nutritionist at the University of Manitoba, heard about McLeod’s system, she thought it would work well for beef producers.
“You’re always looking for cheap feed sources,” she said. “Chaff in itself has been successful for something like the overwintering cows, but not really what you would look at for a backgrounding animal.”
Gathers ideas
Wittenberg has kept track of the project, and said one reason McLeod has come so far is that he keeps in touch with experts and farmers, and incorporates some of their ideas into his machine.
If the system becomes available for sale, she thinks farmers would consider it when it’s time to replace a combine or expand the farm because it saves money, has environmental benefits and gives them more control over the byproducts of their grain.
“If there’s a feedlot nearby that’s willing to pay for a higher percentage starch and a higher percent protein, the system can be set up to accommodate that,” she said.
“It’s really giving the grain producer a lot of marketing power that they didn’t have before, in my eyes.”
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“It’s really giving the grain producer a lot of marketing power that they didn’t have before, in my eyes.”
