CREMONA, Alta. – Chinook Country Farms has been raising beef near Cremona for three generations. In the early 1990s, the farm got into the export timothy production business when that industry started to take off.
“We were not selling much hay before the timothy market came to be here,” says Larry Gano, who farms with father Alton, wife Joy and four children.
“We were growing a lot less hay and what we did grow, we fed ourselves. We sold round bales occasionally, but we got into the square bale market with the onset of the export markets.”
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While the export timothy market can be lucrative, weather in the area just east of the Rockies can make it a challenge to meet export grade. At the end of the 1990s, after struggling with uncertain haying weather, the Ganos started thinking about building a hay dryer.
“Our motivation was the export timothy market and trying to get hay up in this area dry enough to export,” Gano said.
“It’s a continual frustration, our haying season. We only have one good haying season in five – the rest of them we fight with the weather.”
A timothy exporter in a neighboring town had already built a hay drying system when Gano decided to get serious about his idea.
“We talked to them a lot, then had a local engineer in Cremona who’s quite well versed on air movement and things of this nature. They were a big help. The University of Saskatchewan has a lot of data from Europe, where drying hay is quite widespread. They were a help, too,” he said.
While the building is now called the hay barn, it was originally built as a calving barn.
“We built it high enough so if we needed it for hay storage through the fall and winter before we needed it for calving, it would work as a dual purpose building. When this idea was materializing, we thought maybe this would be the building to use,” Gano said.
“It had a dirt floor in it at the time, so we dug the floor out, put in underfloor ductwork, cemented the floor in, put grates under where the rows of hay would be and went from there. It was only two or three years before that we’d built the building, so it was relatively new.”
The building is 50 feet wide and 96 feet long. Gano set it up so he could put two drying rows in it – one on each side.
“The trench underneath, for drawing air through the grates, is eight feet wide by four feet deep, initially,” Gano said.
“Then it steps up in two stages to a point where it draws from the far end is only about two feet deep, but the full eight feet wide. That gives us ample vent room. We can move a lot of air through that.”
Used catwalk grate from a local scrap yard was rebuilt into grating to go on top of the trenches.
“We wanted to build the grate so it was adequate to store machinery or haul heavy loads on. The grate itself is eight feet wide and 86 feet long.”
A full load on one side of the dryer is 12, seven-foot stacks, 10 rows high. When the hay drying season is over, Gano covers the grates and turns the building back into a calving barn.
“We built a rubber mat that we can unroll once we get the hay out and we want to convert to the calving barn,” he said.
“The cattle could walk on (the grates) but we use a lot of sawdust to bed the calving barn, so rather than have to clean our trench out yearly we just cover it up.”
The rafters in the building were sheeted in to create an air duct through the attic. The main duct goes through the centre of the attic and is then vented to duct work on either row.
“We can only dry one row at a time, so we open one set of ducts and close the other to allow the hot air to get in above the stack,” he said.
“We put the stack in over the grate, then drop side curtains made from ordinary stack tarp hung from the ceiling. At the bottom, there’s a four-inch sewer pipe bolted to it. One winch rolls up each side.”
Gano uses end tarps as well as a series of hooks in the ceiling.
“We often have less than 12 wagon loads to dry, so if there’s 10 or eight loads, we hang the face tarp at wherever we need to, against the stack. Then we have to lay plastic over the grate that isn’t covered so it draws through the stack.”
For the first couple of years, Gano dried his hay with natural air.
“We drew air through the attic, down through the hay and out. That did work. We could dry hay but it was a slower process. So we added a boiler and heat exchanger. The exchanger was out of a gas plant. It’s about a nine-foot by 12-foot radiator. It has two fans in it, as well.”
The dryer puts heated air into the top of the building and then sucks it through from the top of the stack to the bottom to draw out the moisture. Gano said the tarps suck right into the stacks when the dryer is operating.
“The vacuum draws them right into every crease and hollow in the stack. We try and minimize the air drawn from outside sources, but of course there’s still leaks. We seal it up as best as we can.”
The main suction fan is a centrifugal type.
“We built a mechanical room on the end of the hay barn to accommodate the machinery we need to do the job for us,” he said.
Initially, Gano drove the suction fan and the two fans in the exchanger with the power take-off from a tractor. However, that drew a lot of power and also tied up a tractor, so he bought an old stationary motor, which includes a transmission attached to a drive shaft that drives the centrifugal fan.
A belt system drives the two heat exchanger fans off the same drive shaft.
“It’s a 14-litre Cummins diesel engine and (the system) works it. It’s an old motor, I’d suspect somewhere over 200 hp. We were running it with a 150 pto hp tractor, so it’s a significant draw on power,” Gano said.
“We vent the exhaust from that motor outside because we found it would draw the exhaust in through the stack and actually taint the hay a little bit. You could smell the diesel exhaust in the hay.”
Gano said the original drying system, which used natural air, took days to dry a stack.
“At 20 percent, it would take two or three hot sunny days to draw it down to 11 percent. When we added the boiler and heat exchanger, we could bring it down from 21 percent moisture to 11 percent in about 20 hours,” he said.
“It’s roughly half a percent an hour, but that’s not how the system works. It dries the top row bone dry, then works its way down. It doesn’t dry the stack gradually, all at once. You can monitor it and know exactly where it is. It’s like a drying front that moves through the stack that works its way down.
“If we’ve had a breakdown, or for whatever reason we can’t continue to dry, that drying front seems to set up in the bales and it’s hard to continue. So we like to get the hay in there, start drying and keep drying until it’s done.”
The wood-fired boiler burns slabs from a local sawmill.
While the boiler improved the drying time, Gano still wasn’t satisfied with how much heat he was getting from the wood.
“It’s a 20 foot long boiler, so we knew we should be able to get a tremendous amount of heat out of it. We modified it this spring by putting a suction fan on the firebox of the boiler. It will bring it down much quicker than the half a percent an hour we were doing it at.”
Each stack of timothy weighs about five tonnes, so a full cycle dries about 60 tonnes. When dry, the stacks are removed and taken to a separate storage shed.
“We’ve built a retriever wagon to move the stacks out. We hired it done for a few years, hiring a retriever truck in to move them out. That worked fine, but it’s a matter of not being able to find a truck when we wanted the shed empty,” Gano said.
“Usually the morning we want it empty, the afternoon we want it filled again. We want it out in a timely fashion, so we built a wagon that would retrieve the stacks and put them in storage in other hay sheds.”
Gano said the dryer system is used in specific situations.
“When we have a stretch of hot, dry weather, we don’t have time to use the drying shed. Everything’s going right and there’s no need to,” he said.
“We’ve found the times we use it are if we have a humid day where we’ve got hay that would normally be dry, but we can’t get it down to that 11 percent required for export. Depending on how much hay we have down, we’ll probably fill both sides up that day and start drying as quickly as we can.
“We use it more to work those days we wouldn’t ordinarily be working, or the days when we have a particularly bad forecast for the following day and hay is not ready to bale. We can do the same with it: bale it up a day in advance and put it in there. If both sides are empty, we get busy and fill both sides.”
This summer, Gano said he got a bit carried away and didn’t put anything in the dryer that was less than 25 percent moisture.
“We even put some in at 40 percent, that also had eight tenths of rain on it before we got it in there. It still worked, but the drying front got down to the bottom of the stack, then we couldn’t move it,” he said.
“What I think happened is we drew so much water out of the stack so quickly that it drew it down to the bottom two layers. I think it settled in those two layers and expanded the bales to where we couldn’t draw air through it. So it wasn’t a good experiment, and I don’t think we need to put it in that tough. If we stay at 25 percent and down, I don’t think we’re going to have a problem.”
While the dryer does work well for the Gano family, it’s not perfect.
“There’s three drawbacks: the expense of drying it; the expense of moving it a second time and the fact that you’re left with somewhat less than ideal bales,” he said.
“When we’re baling tough hay, we intentionally take the tension off the baler. When the bales are dried, they tend to be a little bit loose. They don’t slump into a loose, sloppy pile, but they’re lighter.
“Normally we try to have a 55 pound bale. After these bales come out of the dryer, they’re more like 45 lb., so they do lose a little bit of weight.”
While Gano said the dryer can provide a form of insurance for his hay operation, he added it’s also cost him money.
“The forecast is not always right. The idea is, we use it like we use our grain aeration system. We use it as much as we can and in the long run, I’m sure it will pay off. But every load doesn’t necessarily pay off. Some days, you go to the expense of drying it and the following day you could have been baling it dry without the expense.”
