Inflate-deflate technology can avoid compaction and save you money on fuel

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Ontario farmers are demonstrating that deflating their tires once they leave the road can provide considerable costs savings while avoiding soil compaction in the field

by DON STONEMAN


Moorefield pork producer Jake Kraayenbrink says he has inflation and deflation technology working on self-propelled sprayers and manure spreaders. The tractors that pull the spreaders, however, are another story.

Kraayenbrink says he is in discussion with companies that might be able to help him, but it is too early to talk about it. "We know it works," he says. "We are not pleased with the cosmetics, the way it appears."

He is working on a simplified compressor system and he hopes to see a technology that can be easily removed for maintenance and switched from machine to machine.

Kraayenbrink started building his own inflate-deflate tire systems because he wanted to protect his fields from the effects of compaction by ever-larger farm equipment, and because the European equipment didn't suit conditions here in North America.

Inflate-deflate technology has a couple of advantages, Kraayenbrink says. Tires normally inflated for road travel cause soil compaction when equipment is in the field. Running on deflated tires in the field not only reduces compaction, it decreases fuel use. Kraayenbrink says that, in his own test, deflated tires in a loaded large manure tanker resulted in a 14 per cent fuel savings on one of his dry fields. He surmises that this is because the deflated tire has a larger footprint and resistance is reduced because "the tanker tire doesn't have to climb out of the ground." Kraayenbrink says he has read that savings could be as much as 25 per cent when conditions aren't ideal.

Inflation-deflation technology is used in Europe, but most deflators typically don't let air out of the tires fast enough to suit North American farmers, Kraayenbrink says. European manure spreaders typically have injectors that take a couple of minutes to deploy. North American farmers broadcast manure on top of the soil and they want to be able to start as soon as they enter a field. A good deflation time would be 30 seconds, not the 90 seconds to two minutes experienced with the European technology.

Kraayenbrink says he found a technology in Europe that would work in North America, but the company across the ocean wasn't going to provide technical support, so he created his own.
He has inflate-deflate technology in his own manure spreader as well as two self-propelled sprayers, a John Deere 4730 and a 4830. The sprayers have their own compressors anyway, Kraayenbrink says.

The sprayer tires run on roads at 65 pounds per square inch and at 40 pounds in the field. If you run at 40 pounds on the road, "you will destroy the tires," he says.

The technology is also being used by Baden dairy farmer Kees Hogendoorn, who says he is pleased with the results after two seasons spreading 3-3.5 million gallons of manure in the spring from 480 cows on his 1,500 acres of cropland. Hogendoorn says that, with that many acres to spread manure on and to plant crops, he and his crew are nearly always going onto the fields early. The inflate deflate technology "covers up our mistakes," Hogendoorn says.

He pulls two 6,000-gallon Nuhn tankers in tandem with a Steiger 435 tractor. He also spreads manure on alfalfa fields after taking second and third cuts and planting an oat cover crop after wheat harvest. He wants to utilize nutrients before they are washed away. Of the fields, 1,200 acres are within five kilometres of the home barn. A couple of farms are six to eight kilometres away.

Hogendoorn says the tractor operator pulls into the field and drops the tire pressure to "medium," 20 psi from 38 psi, in about 10 seconds. At the end of the headland, he hits the switch again and reduces the tire pressure to 16 psi. When the tanker is emptied, the operator re-inflates the tires from 14 air tanks underneath the spreader. Hogendoorn says the air tanks are the same as the equipment used on tractor trailers to run their air brakes. He says a new version of this early tanker has a single large air tank.

Two years ago, Hogendoorn spread some manure on fields using an older 6,750-gallon tanker with radial tires, as well as the big tandem. The fields appeared to be dry, but the smaller tanker left tracks where the larger tanker did not. Last spring, the smaller tanker stayed in the yard and Hogendoorn ran more hours on the larger tanker.

If there are visible tracks, there will be an effect on crops, Hogendoorn notes. BF