One grain drier serves farms 20 miles apart
Sharing a grain drier between two farms 20 miles apart might not ideal, but for two Cambridgeshire farming families it has proved to be the right move, as Nick Fone reports
Michael Cottage and his son Chris farm 300ha (750 acres) close to Haverhill while Peter and Ian Wombwell’s 240ha (600-acre) arable unit lies just on the outskirts of Cambridge. The distance between the two farms isn’t huge, but shuffling a conventional tub-type mobile drier backwards and forwards would prove a real headache.
So when things turned wet last year the two businesses opted for a slightly different approach. Prompted by the atrocious weather of the past two harvests, both father-and-son partnerships wondered how best to tackle the heaps of damp grain in store.
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| With a 180hp Massey 8160 up front, the TurboDan TraylerDryer has plenty of power on tap and is capable of drying 15t batches down from 18% in 1.5 hours. |
“A mobile machine looked like the best option, but they’re not generally designed to be shifted long distances on the road.
“We’d heard of trailer-driers and decided to take a look down that route.”
Late last year Essex firm Tey Farm Systems took on the import rights for Danish-built Turbodan Trayler Dryers and, as luck would have it, had a 15t 2001 TD15 model in stock with just 700 hours on the clock.
“We liked the simplicity of the Turbodan; it’s basically a downsized drying-floor on wheels,” says Peter Wombwell.
“Really it’s just a trailer with a mesh floor and a burner up front. Because you load it with a bucket and empty it by tipping it up, there are very few moving parts to go wrong.
“We were offered the used machine at a really good rate, so we went for it. In the end it cost each farm about £17,000.”
When it arrived last November the Turbodan was put straight to work drying grain just before collection. Both farms are able to hold grain in store at up to 18% moisture and then dry it down to 15% before lorries arrive to haul it away through the winter.
Using cold, humid air, the partnership found it took up to 1.5 hours to bring a 15t batch of 18% grain down the 3% required. In summer this is closer to one hour, with a further half an hour to cool it.
How it works
Originally dreamt up and built by Cork farmer Niall O’Farrell, the Trayler Dryer has been around for nearly 25 years. In 2001 the design rights were sold to Danish entrepreneur Svend Lassen and his company – Turbodan – has been building the 15t, 18t and 25t units in their distinctive yellow-and-green livery ever since.>
Constructed in much the same way as a monocoque trailer body, the Trayler Dryer has a mesh floor with a full-width air channel running underneath it. With the body fully loaded with grain, air is blasted through it by a monstrous pto-powered turbine fan mounted on the drawbar. Sitting on top of this is a diesel-fired burner unit that, fed by an 800-litre fuel tank mounted between the chassis rails, gets air temperatures up to the 100C mark.
A simple control panel monitors air and grain temperature and automatically adjusts the burner accordingly. Once the whole batch has reached the target temperature – usually about 48C – the burner shuts down and the drier switches to cooling mode, with the fan blowing cold air through the crop for a further half hour.
Keeping things moving up in the body are three auger-stirrers, which move on a predetermined route through the grain, bringing hot corn up from the floor and mixing the whole batch. Electrically-driven, these get their power from a 12kW pto-powered generator.
“With the fan and generator powered from the pto, the drier needs a pretty hefty tractor up front. I wouldn’t want anything less than 130hp on it,” says Peter Wombwell.
“We run it with a 190hp Case MXM 190 and the Cottages hook it up to their 180hp Massey 8160.”
Although high in comparison with more conventional tub-type driers, the power requirement actually suits the farms’ machinery fleet well, as both businesses’ cultivations tractors have usually finished their autumn workload before the lorries start arriving and drying kicks off in earnest.
“When diesel prices hit their peak of 64p/litre, I worked out we were using about £6/t to run the tractor and the burner, taking out about 2.5% moisture,” says Michael Cottage.
“At Camgrain, where we store some of our crops, we pay about £1.50 for every percentage point they bring it down, so at that point it was cheaper to let them do it. You’ve got to take all your costs into account to see if it is worthwhile.”
| Costs compared | Opico | Master Farm | Mecmar | TurboDan |
| Time taken to remove 5% moisture and cool grain (hourds) | 2 | 2 | 1.5 | 2 |
| Diesel usage (litres/%/t) | 0.9-1.2 | 1.4-1.6 | 1 | 2* |
| Gas usage (litres/%/t) | 2 | – | 1.4 | – |
*Includes fuel for both tractor and drier
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