FARGO, North Dakota – Many people assume pull-type combines are slipping into the history books.
But the Amadas 2105 is making waves on the show circuit this autumn.
It’s is a specialty bean combine built in Suffolk, Virginia.
“The 2105 is designed to allow a grower to harvest more (bean) acreage faster and more efficiently, in a wider range of conditions, with less crop loss and less crop damage,” said Amadas Industries chief executive officer James
Adams II. “It averages 10 to 12 acres per hour.”
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Adams, who accompanied the combine to the Big Iron Farm show in Fargo, North Dakota on Sept. 12-14, said his company can make those kinds of performance claims because the inside working width is a generous 96 inches. Field tests have shown that the combine can handle up to 16 rows of windrowed beans at ground speeds of five to 10 km-h.
Dale Murray is convinced the Amadas gives him higher quality beans. The farmer from Oakville, Man., grows 500 to 1,000 acres of edible beans a year. For the past four years, he has harvested with an Amadas pull type.
“In tough conditions, it’ll go and harvest beans in places no other combine can work,” Murray said in a phone interview from his home.
“It’s a very slow, very gentle threshing mechanism. There’s no cylinder in this combine. Instead they have springs that pull the vines apart from the pods. We get more beans and a better sample.”
Murray said he was sold on the idea about five years ago when his dealer demonstrated one of
the machines on his farm, combining 48 foot double swaths.
“The weather went from sunshine to rain to snow and then the next thing it froze. We were down to a mile and a half per hour (2.5 km-h), but we kept combining. The beans were excellent. You’d expect to see a lot of smearing in those conditions, but there was no smearing. The beans were very high quality. That convinced me.”
Murray bought his bean machine from Ray Bouchard, co-owner of the Enns Brothers John Deere dealership in Portage la Prairie, Man. Bouchard said the dealership has sold six of the specialty Amadas combines, which cost approximately $150,000.
The patented gentle threshing technology preserves bean quality by using a high number of low-impact, low-speed hits rather than a low number of hard, fast hits.
The closed-loop threshing system puts more beans in the bank because unthreshed pods are continuously recirculated back through instead of falling to the ground out the back.
Adams said engineers accepted the fact that bean harvest puts the pickup right down to the ground. Therefore, they developed an extra large area for screening dirt and foreign material.
They also put in a large, high-clearance, spring-tooth apparatus to handle rocks. They employ a disc style separator that doesn’t bind up with heavy wet material. The collection auger is a large-diameter, low-speed unit that minimizes pod damage. The dump bin gently offloads the beans as a screen cylinder removes the final bits of dirt.
Adams said John Deere is a partner in the Amadas 2105 pull-type project, and many of the unique 2105 features can be bought through John Deere dealers for installation on STS combines.
For more information, contact Ray Bouchard at 204-857-3451 or visit www.amadas.com.
