Straight cutting canola will eventually replace swathing, according to Wayne Bracken.
The Clandeboye, Man., farmer is the first Canadian customer to plunk down his money for an Austrian-built Biso canola straight cut attachment being imported by Robert Breckner.
“We’ve straight cut a fair bit of canola before this year, so that’s nothing new to us,” said Bracken.
“You always get a lot bigger seeds. They’re full and mature and nice and black. I’m convinced now that straight cut is the way to go. I don’t even want to think about swathing canola anymore.
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“You see guys out there swathing early when the stuff is green as grass. You go and squeeze the seeds and it’s nothing but juice. By the time that seed dries out and matures, it’s like pepper.”
While Breckner said a week after the normal swathing date is about the correct timing for a straight cut harvest, Bracken said in his experience, top seed quality requires a much longer wait.
Bracken has more reasons than crop quality to stop swathing. It’s expensive, time consuming and hard on equipment. In 2004, he had his normal sized canola crop of 800 acres. Half got swathed. The other half was straight cut with the Biso.
“The swather churned up the mud and made one hell of a mess. We were trying to get crop into the combine and we were picking up mud and making a mess of the pickup. We had the concaves out of the combine a couple of times this year to wash them. They were packed solid with mud. It was sickening.”
Halfway into the harvest season, with 400 acres of canola still standing, Bracken decided to buy the Biso attachment. He is glad he did. Although it was Nov. 18 before he was finished threshing, much of the straight cut crop came off at 40 bushels.
There’s no way of knowing what the losses would have been had he swathed or used a conventional straight cut header, but he does know his yield would not have been close to 40 bu. The Biso catch pan has a lot to do with that.
“That pan between the knife and reel collects anything the reel shells out. It all goes into the combine.”
Is the Biso worth the money?
“Well, it’s maybe a little pricey for what you’re actually getting, but I don’t think it’ll take long to pay for itself.”
