Applying liquid rather than granular nitrogen in the spring has become a pretty popular choice among western Canadian growers. For most, though, that has meant adding another cart equipped with a liquid tank to an already long train of equipment behind the tractor in order to make a seeding pass. Now, however, growers can get a single air cart that is liquid ready right from the factory.
At Canada’s Farm Progress Show in Regina in June, Salford pulled the wraps off its brand new 945 bushel AC4000L air cart, configured to apply both dry and liquid fertilizer along with seed.
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“We had a producer who was very interested in modifying his AC3000 Salford cart to have a liquid tank on it,” explains Anson Boak, Salford’s marketing manager. “And we started to get other requests to add liquid. When we saw this one fellow who was about to strike out on his own, we thought, hey, we can facilitate this and developed the unit we have here, with 505 bushel dry capacity and the 4,000 gallon liquid tank.”
In other configurations, the AC4000 can be built with additional dry product capacity instead of a liquid tank. The modular design of the carts allows for combinations of up to five poly tanks, including a 65 bushel canola tank. Salford can provide poly tanks in 140, 180 and 220 bushel sizes. Because the tanks are independent, a scale option is available so operators can continuously monitor the amount of product inside them.
“The liquid tank could come off and we could have two more 220 bushel dry tanks on the back,” he adds.
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The AC4000 Series also stretches the previous overall capacity limits of Salford’s air cart line. At 945 bushels, it is the largest model the company has yet produced, and the brand is now ready to fill customer orders for it. The new series also incorporates some design improvements that will eventually be made available on all the company’s air carts.
“We’re capable of putting a smaller liquid tank onto smaller carts as well,” adds Boak. “What will trickle down from the 4000 cart to most of the series new models is creature comforts. Little things like the platform, we’ve gone to a deck that’s all one level. It’s raised up the height of the cart, but it’s made it much safer.”
The carts use a stainless steel meter with interchangeable rollers for different flow rates. The liquid N systems use a Hypro 9300 pump on hydraulic variable-rate models and a John Blue pump on ground driven machines.
To address the almost universal concern among producers, which is to keep fill times down, the AC4000 Series gets a 16-inch conveyor belt that runs inside a 10-inch tube and is capable of lifting 67 bushels per minute into the compartments.
“We’ve worked very hard with Convey-All to work on this hydraulically remote-operated conveyor system,” he continues. “With the amount of product and the capacities, the fill times guys were looking to achieve and the auger system we had weren’t cutting it. This has come a long way.
“We took a lot of small cues from producers this season to put into the design of this cart — some nice tweaks to really make it nicer to operate.”
