A list of the leaders in soil conservation doesn’t usually include spray plane pilots or farm mechanics, but circumstances create odd partnerships.
Charlie Balmer never expressed an interest in soil conservation. When the young Swiss immigrant ended up in Elie, Man., in 1954, his passions were airplanes and farm machinery.
By 1961, his mechanical ability had earned him enough to buy his first aircraft and he became one of Manitoba’s pioneer crop dusters.
His reputation as a top pilot and innovative mechanic came to the attention of Monsanto in 1976, when it approached him to develop a metering system for aerial application of Avadex.
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Experience told Balmer that accurate Avadex application from the air was not possible, and he told Monsanto so. Then, he set out to develop a tank and metering system that attached to a floater, which is how Valmar Airflo was born.
Once farmers had a machine to accurately apply Avadex, and eventually Treflan, it became possible to achieve acceptable weed control and still maintain trash cover to trap snow and stop soil erosion. Farmers began backing away from black fallow.
Balmer then reasoned that if the Airflo worked for granular herbicides, it should work just as well for granular fertilizer.
The AirMax and Air Spreader designs he patented 30 years ago are still in production with few modifications.
Balmer’s inventive mind also prompted in-crop spraying of fungicides, post-emergent herbicides, insecticides, nitrogen top-dressing, desiccants and the whole range of Roundup Ready crops.
He saw that farmers needed big volume, high clearance sprayers to cover the kind of broad acre crops prairie producers typically grow. Small European sprayers were fine for vegetable fields, but not for wheat and canola.
The Wilmar AirRide, designed and built by Balmer in the late 1980s, was the first high-capacity, high-clearance sprayer in North America, and made in-crop spraying a reality across the continent.
The Airflo, AirMax, AirRide and other Valmar products were all born out of Balmer’s 1977 statement: “The farm machinery industry has not kept abreast of the advancements made by other aspects of agriculture.”
Balmer died in 2006 and was inducted into the Canadian Agriculture Hall of Fame in November 2007.
At the time of his death, he was working on a number of projects:
- A working prototype of a high volume, dual purpose, high clearance machine that switched between liquid and granular in less than 10 minutes.
- A working prototype of a cylindrical high clearance sprayer that eliminated the frame by attaching components to the cylindrical
tank. It was light, strong, cheaper to build and had a clean underside for applying fungicides to flowering crops.
- A working prototype of a hovercraft sprayer that worked in muddy fields without making a mess.
- The Power Wheel, an engineering concept to provide hydrostatic drive without the burnouts, costly repairs and mud drive problems associated with conventional orbital motors.
He was going to equip a new Versatile 4×4 tractor with his Power Wheel hydrostatic drive.
At the time of his death, he had managed to build only one of the necessary four Power Wheel prototype units.
