CRAIK, Sask. – Veteran hemp growers know the crop can be a harvest nightmare.
Using a Case IH combine without a Harvest Services 360 degree rotor can make for long, trouble-filled days in the hemp field.
John Ackland has been growing hemp on his farm near Craik for a number of years.
“We have a Case IH 1680 combine. The elephant ear rotors will just wrap with hemp and you’ll have a nightmare. When I first went into hemp I said I had to find a different rotor for the combine. I did that right away,” Ackland said.
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“The Harvest Services rotor is the optimum rotor for doing hemp. They have a 360 degree screw on the front and they’re the only ones out there that do 360. It probably increased the capacity of my combine at least 30 percent, if not better.
“It’s something we stumbled onto and it’s very successful. It simplified a lot of things, especially with hemp. You can have nightmares with hemp, because it’s very wrappy and a fibrous crop.”
Ackland said he has combined hemp at up to 6.5 mph using the Harvest Rotor, but typically only does 60 to 80 acres a day.
He generally harvests his hemp tough, at around 16 percent moisture, and then dries it down to nine or eight percent for storage. The crop is harvested at the end of the season, so weather conditions aren’t always hot and dry. Having a rotor that resists wrapping in those conditions is a big benefit.
“It isn’t cheap to do,” he said.
“You have to update your rotor. Or if you have an updated rotor, they’ll take the rotor in and over the winter they’ll cut the end of it off and put the 360 degree screw on for you.”
Ackland said the 360 degree rotor is also used for wheat and other crops on his farm.
J.J. Vibert of Harvest Services Ltd. in Craik said his company calls it the Harvest Rotor.
“It’s a borrowed design from the Massey combine or the big old Whites. They always had the 360 degree flight and we basically put it into the International combine.”
Vibert said Harvest Services has had the rotor on the market for the past four years.
“Ours is 360 degree flights while everybody else has two 180 degrees. They call them 360, but it’s actually two at 180. We’ve got two 360 flights,” he said.
“The Harvest rotor has 12 inch long rub bars, while the specialty rotor (rub bars) from Case IH are shorter. With our bigger rub bar design, it’s still like a standard rotor, but it gives a better thrash in dry conditions. In tough conditions, we won’t end up roping, like the guys did with the old standard rotor.”
Vibert said Harvest Services has run its modified rotor beside the AFX rotor and achieved the same results for fuel economy and other harvest criteria when in tough conditions.
“The only time our rotor does a better job is in the dry conditions, which most guys are in. We can do a better job of thrashing because of that bigger rub bar,” he said.
“Ours is a lot like a grain auger, the way it’s designed. Even as it wears, as long as you put material there, it’s going to feed it in.
“Another thing with ours, you don’t have to put stainless steel or heavy duty vanes in. As long as your vanes are in good shape, you don’t have to replace them. With the original Case ones, you have to replace everything. Guys have actually collapsed them putting the brand new heavy duty vanes in because they’re still throwing all the material to the outside, where ours brings it in.”
Harvest Services has rotors for Case IH models, from a 1480 to a 2588.
“It goes 1480, 1680, 1688, then 2188, 2388 and 2588. We haven’t done many of the 60 series, like the 1460, 1666 and 2366,” he said.
“If you’ve got a specialty rotor (with the elephant ears) right now and you want to make it equivalent to an AFX, we can put our flight on. That’s what John has, actually. They take the rotor out, leave it with us for a day or two, we cut the front off and weld our flighting on.
“A complete rotor is $6,000. If they give us their old one, it brings it down to $5,500. To upgrade the specialty rotor to the 360 screw is around $2,200.”
Vibert said Harvest Services doesn’t modify rotors for other rotary combines, such as John Deere or New Holland.
“I guess the John Deere combines are having trouble and somebody’s wanting us to try and build one for them, with our flight on the John Deere. But the John Deere rotor turns the other way, so we have to try and figure that out,” Vibert said.
“We haven’t gone anywhere yet. The guy has never got serious and we’re not real interested, because John Deere doesn’t have trouble feeding.”
He said hemp isn’t a big enough crop for his company to worry too much about.
“There’s not enough market there to try and sell a hemp rotor. But our rotor works good for what we’re doing in other crops,” he said.
“We can do everything from beans to wheat to corn. It wasn’t designed specifically for hemp, but it’s working there, too.”
