Glacier FarmMedia — As Morris Equipment and Rite Way manufacturing announced they will be merged together under a new parent company called Superior Farms Equipment, they also introduced the first new product to be released under that company structure, the Morris 10 Series air cart.
“It’s kind of an evolution,” says Garth Massie, Canadian sales and marketing manager at Morris. ‘We had the 9 Series introduced in 2013. We’ve been working behind the scenes on this cart for a while.”
The new 10 Series carts, which will be available as the 660, 820 and 1050, have been undergoing field trials and farmer evaluations for a few seasons.
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The new units are also slated to be part of the 2024 Innovations Program at Ag in Motion and will be on display at the Saskatchewan farm show, running July 16-18.
“We’ve been taking it slower on staged releases, really trying to debug this machine before we go full tilt with the production of it,” says Massie. “We’re introducing three, four-tank models. One of the things you’ll notice when you first walk up to it is they are individual tanks on scales. I think it’s in tune with the way the market has gone and what farmers really want in air carts now.
“We’ve designed the tank proportions to try and maximize the number of acres per fill. We have a small tank that is used for granular inoculant or canola. After some testing, the farmers said if you could make that a bit bigger, that would be great. It’s not always completely empty when we go to fill.”
So that tank size has been increased to 80 bushels on the final production models.
“We call it the optimizer tank, because it seems to help stretch the arches per fill,” he adds.
The 660 and 820 will be available in both tow-behind and tow-between configurations. When the series was announced this spring, the 1050 was to be built only as a tow-behind tank, but the company in early July said its 1050 will also be “the largest commercially available tow-between cart.”
The carts will ride on wheels only. Tracks won’t be an option.
“We’ve moved in the direction of larger rims and tires in order to get low inflation pressures and reduce compaction that way,” Massie adds.
The new carts will also get a significantly redesigned metering system. The previous 9 Series used hydraulics to control each section on the tank meters. The 10 Series will use a maintenance-free electric drive motor to run each section individually.
“The metering system is all new,” says Massie. “Before, our sectional control system was hydraulically driven and there were gear clusters with a hydraulic cylinder that actuated them. Now we’ve gone to electric motors, so there’s a motor for each section. We’ll go up to 10 sections. So there is an electric motor that drives each section on each tank. So you could have up to 40 different motors on a cart.”
For loading, the 10 Series will use a new conveyor design built by partner company Convey-All, which Massie says has demonstrated it can load up to 108 bushels of wheat per minute during field trials.
Many of the design changes on the new carts were intended to reduce the amount of down time. Massie says was a key focus for engineers when creating the 10 Series.
“At Morris there was a focus at looking at how do we minimize the amount of time the drill isn’t running up and down the fields actually seeding, reducing down time.”
Although Morris and Rite Way are now joined under a new parent company, they will continue to operate as individual brands, but farmers will eventually begin seeing slightly different decals on the sides of implements. The firm says they will begin transitioning their product lines to Rite Way SFE, Morris SFE and ProAG SFE.
“Over time you’re going to see some Superior Farms decals on Morris equipment and on Rite Way equipment,” says Massie. “We’ll kind of ease into it. Of course there’s brand equity in Morris and Rite Way. The thing for people to get used to is Superior Farms. I think you’ll see Morris and Rite Way in the long term be very prominent. You’ll also see Superior Farms decaling to tie them into this new parent company.
Morris produced a limited production run of 10 Series carts this year and is now taking orders for delivery in time for the 2025 seeding season.
