When the weather is good during harvest, every grower wants the combine to get right to work. There is pressure to just keep it moving to cover as many acres as possible while the weather holds and accept whatever threshing performance it offers. But not taking time to pay close attention to combine settings can mean leaving a lot of dollars in the field.
“When a combine sits there for two minutes it feels like three hours for the farmer,” says Marcel Kringe, founder and CEO of Bushel Plus Ltd., which has established the Bushel Plus Harvest Academy in Canada. It will start conducting training sessions for growers and ag professionals this year on how to get the most out of a combine and, importantly, how to keep it rolling when it counts.
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“We can teach them how fast and quick this is. They can do a ton of stuff before harvest even starts. That’s really the eye-opening thing, I think. It’s easier to fine-tune in the field once the understanding of the machine is there, which is what we train, and the pre-harvest setting is done.
“It’s all about value and how to make a combine work no matter what kind of combine you have. It’s really understanding the inner workings of a combine and how one change creates a chain reaction throughout the machine, and how different harvest conditions can influence that. You cannot just compare settings with other people and hope for the best.”
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Kringe, who has a background in agricultural engineering, says he has spent most of the last two decades working with custom harvesters and grain growers in many different regions of the world, getting combines to operate at peak performance. His firm also operates a similar combine consulting business in Europe, and is working with Assiniboine Community College at Brandon, Man. and Lakeland College in Alberta to help train students in combine operation.
“We’ve been doing training in Canada and the U.S. for a little while,” he says, “but at the same time we were able to continue a business in Germany where someone wanted to retire. He had been doing combine clinics for over 25 years all over Europe. We’ve taken over that company. We now combine all the knowledge from Europe and North America and made one big Harvest Academy out of it.”
Bushel Plus is taking bookings from grower organizations, seed growers, equipment dealers or anyone who wants to arrange a seminar on how to properly set combines.
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“We got a lot of questions from farmers about these training programs,” he says. “We’ve done a lot of keynote speaking on it. We can customize the program, depending on the customer. We can be very specific, for example, for seed growers that are very conscious about grain quality.
“We can customize a half-hour to one-hour speech about problems inside the combine through the threshing and separating system, all the way up to a full day where we go through the entire combine front to back.”
‘Myth-busting’
While he acknowledges many growers are pretty good at setting combines, he has found there are still many persistent misconceptions.
“We get the very same questions in Europe that we get here. We get the same misconceptions in the different countries where we work. We’re doing a lot of myth-busting.”
Much of the training Kringe’s firm offers can be applied across all different brands of combines, but he is also able to address the different models available and the setting considerations that are unique to each one.
“There is a lot of stuff that applies to all brands, but there are a lot of things we have to point out that are different in the different machines or sometimes even different models within a brand.”
To find out more about the Bushel Plus Harvest Academy or arrange a training event, Kringe can be contacted through the company’s website.
“This is kind of filling a need,” he says. “We got a lot of feedback from the industry, seed companies, grain associations and farmers that asked us if we would do more of this.”
