Trends In Farm Machines Of The Future

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32209, 30 January 1970, Page 10

Trends In Farm Machines Of The Future

He was looking for improvements in existing types of equipment, particularly by simplification, Mr A. L. Mulholland, chairman of the agriculture section of North Canterbury Federated Farmers, said during a panel discussion on new developments in farm mechanisation held recently by the Canterbury section of the New Zealand Institute of Agricultural Science.

Mr Mulholland said that there had been remarkably few breakthroughs in farm equipment since the end of the last century. The modern combine harvester was “a glorified wooden mill.” The wooden mill incorporated a system of grain separation introduced in the last century which was almost identical with that used in the modern combine harvester. The combine harvester did a satisfactory job under good conditions, but there were conditions where the efficiency of the machine was suspect Mr Mulholland said he still felt that the soil must be inverted and a good technique for doing this was by using the plough. The plough had come down through the ages and only the material used in the construction of the mouldboard plough had changed. As good or better weed control could be achieved by “chemical ploughing,” but this did not give the mechanical actuation of the soil that was involved in the use of the plough and other tillage equipment It was his view, however, that there was a need for something better in the mouldboard steel. At the time of the world ploughing championships at Prebble-ton-Broadfield, he had seen a mouldboard made in Japan with a plastic material, but he understood that under difficult soil conditions at Pukekohe it had not performed well either. He said that he would also like to see some work done on the method of pulling ploughs, as with most ploughs he had used the plough tended to fight the tractor. In the process crop growing field, and for other crops too, there was a place for the development of precision seeders. The grain drill had not changed radically over the years, although the double run grain feed had given way to the fluted feed and this was an advance. With process crops, fertiliser application would also assume much greater importance and it was his opinion that nitrogen and water would really make the Canterbury plains produce, Mr Mulholland said. Because of the drop in prices of farm produce it would be necessary to produce more at a more economic price and nitrogen would have, a part to play in this. He would, therefore like to see both a drill and a spray boom produced that were noncorrosive. Mr Mulholland said that he was also interested in something being done about the efficient marking of the edge of the swath covered by a spray boom. Overseas he understood foam that lasted for up to four hours had been used. This was important where spray application rates were critical and overlapping could be harmful.

Mr LA. Carnie, of P. and D. Duncan, Ltd, said that mouldboard ploughs had not changed much—the first plough with a steel mouldboard had been made about 1780. But they were now getting a limited quantity of a steel from Broken Hill in Australia that was proving its worth in mouldboards. They had tried teflon and a chrome finish on the hoards but it did not last. In the future the trend would be for bigger but lighter ploughs. With new tractors up to 150 horsepower there would be a demand for bigger ploughs and the question would be whether this would be a new plough or two ploughs on a multiple hitch. He said he thought that there would be seven .or eight-furrow ploughs. Mr Carnie said he believed that the trend would be for plastic components in seeders. Referring to a drill of overseas design, he said that some 400 or 500 parts were made of plastic of some kind. A demand for simpler machines had developed with the three point linkage tractor and' it was only through simiplicity that costs could be kept down. Referring to his firm’s interest in development of equipment for handling nitrogenous fertilisers, Mr Carnie said that they were obtaining equipment from Australia for anhydrous ammonia which they intended building into a unit which they proposed to give to Lincoln College. Mr J. S. Dunn, senior research officer at the New Zealand Agricultural Engineering Institute at Lincoln, said that although the plough had come down from the start of history for heavy cultivation, it had to be borne in mind that tractors were getting bigger and there was a limit to the power that could be transmitted through the wheels. Some of the power had to be employed otherwise than drawing the implement through the soil Some of the power had to be transferred to moving the tines through the soil and recently there had been developed a rotary cultivator with gearbox drive which meant that the speed of cutting could be varied. It incorporated six semisubsoiling tines and while partially incorporating residues in the soil it enabled an increased area of soil surface to be exposed to the weather. Good results had been obtained by coupling a rotary cultivator with a seed drill and while this might be against accepted good farming standards, under certain conditions this might be acceptable, and as techniques developed this might .come to have a place.

So far few reversible ploughs had been seen in New Zealand, although in Europe and the United Kingdom their sales exceeded those of conventional ploughs. They were more expensive, and heavier but created a more uniform seed bed. Where a trial had been done with peas, a comparable yield had been obtained with a seeding rate of 901 b to the acre through a precision drill as compared with 2001 b through a conventional drill, Mr Dunn said. In cropping, a likely development was increased placement of insecticides and herbicides in the seedbed at the time of drilling rather than waiting on diseases to develop. Fertiliser would become more concentrated and sophisticated and would need to be applied more accurately. More interest would be taken in irrigation so long as labour costs could be kept down and he believed that there would be more interest in “on-the-farm” water storage. He had been interested to see butyl rubber at the show last year. It was little affected by sunlight and he believed that they would see a lot of it being used for the lining of reservoirs. He forecast that fruit farming would develop on many Canterbury soils. Professor W. E. Yates, professor of agricultural engineering at the University of California at Davis, who is at Lincoln College for a year under a senior research fellowship, discussed developments in techniques of aerial spray application in the United States.

Some of the agents introduced to limit the drift hazard, he said, had the advantage of increasing the accuracy of deposition on the application site. A small percentage of material added to a spray could reduce evaporation and also increase the droplet size. He referred to the use of an invert emulsion, also a powder, which at the rate of about 51b in 100 gallons gave a material of an almost jell-like consistency, and of a granular material that absorbed water and swelled up to about 300 times its original size, giving a flowable product of tapioca-like consistency.

Of developments in actual mechanical equipment, Professor Yates said that a rotary atomiser had been developed in England with about 14 discs on a shaft with small gaps between the discs and which revolved at 10,000 revolutions per minutes. This produced a very fine spray of about 70 microns and where two of these had been mounted on each side of a helicopter it had been possible to use a rate of 0.03 gallons to the acre over a 200 ft swath against mosquitoes. He believed that this showed promise for large scale coverage. Jet type atomisers using extremely small jets also increased the uniformity of droplets. He said he believed that a reduction in spray particle size might be envisaged. Answering a question about the use of a hay watering machine, Professor Yates said that it required more power than a baler. It had a 220 horsepower diesel engine and a lower capacity than a baler but cost $33,000 with a trailer. At the same time it could only operate when the herbage was within a quite limited range of moisture content