New silo Storage Debugs the Farm
Northern NSW grain grower Anthony Barlow felt the weevils were poking fun at him when he tried to fumigate grain in unsealed silos.
“We’d put the phosphine in and they’d run out all the gaps in the silo and wait until the coast was clear and come back in and start on the grain again,” he says.
The challenge this posed to providing clean grain saleable at a good price left Anthony looking for solutions.
“I didn’t have much confidence that the grain I was selling was weevil free,” he says, adding unsealed silos made grain storage much more complex due to the need to try treatments that hopefully worked in time for upcoming sales.
In 2005 Anthony, who grows more than 15000 hectares of wheat and pulses on ‘Booreeyamma’ at Mungindi, on the NSW Queensland border, in partnership with his parents, Fred and Margaret, and his wife, Merryn, invested in his first sealed silo – a 4000 tonne capacity Kotzur sealed and gas-tight silo .
“That silo made us realise how antiquated the unsealed silos we’d been using were,” he says.
The success of the first silo encouraged the Barlows to develop a large grain storage and handling facility on their property in preparation for the 2009 harvest.
Incorporating the first silo, Kotzur designed and installed four 2000t flat floored silos and two 650t cone bottom silos.
The grain is received into the silos through a 40t capacity drive over road pit, which can transfer the grain at 250t/hour into storage. A 250t/hr Downfields bucket elevator with an eight-way automatic rotary distributor loads the grain into the silos via a series of Downfield over-silo drag chain conveyors or direct spouting into the silos. The grain is reclaimed via a series of Kotzur belt conveyors.
Out loading to a truck is via a 120t elevated garner bin on load cells. The road pit is separate to the garner bin, allowing simultaneous in and out loading. A weighbridge and testing station already existed on the site.
From beginning to end the project took three months. It was filled to capacity at harvest 2009 and is almost empty again in preparation for 2010.
“I chose Kotzur because its at the forefront of grain pest management and aeration in silos,” Anthony says.
“Kotzur is professional in its approach to pest management by taking on the latest research and providing gas-tight sealed silos, which are guaranteed.”
Phosphine-resistant grain insects were first detected in Australia 13 years ago and researchers suggest resistance has been fostered by growers who fumigate in unsealed or leaky grain silos.
With 10000ha of wheat and 5500ha of chickpeas and faba beans sown this year, Anthony plans to segregate the wheat according to quality with the biggest volume being stored in pads on the ground, with smaller segregations into the silos. The pulses will be stored in a bulk storage shed on the same site.
About 10 per cent of the cropping area then goes back into summer crops, such as sorghum and mung beans, if the season permits.
“It will take a bit of management at harvest, but we’ll be more in control because there’s no hold ups in grain storage and management which makes us more cost efficient,” Anthony said.
“One of the greatest savings is in reducing handling costs and storage fees we had to pay to bulk handlers.”
And as to the weevils – well Anthony reports they have moved out. He uses a contractor for all grain pest control nowadays and the contractor reports back that the Kotzur silos are his favourites.
More information www.kotzur.com
