Rethus Broadacre

« My name’s Tim Rethus, I’m a grain grower in Horsham, Wimmera. We grow a wide variety of rain fed crops here at Rethus Broadacre, where I farm with my father and my brother. We’re third generation farmers in this area. As well as the three of us, we have three full time farm workers within the operations. We tend to split our work up between us as a team; my brother is excellent on the seeder and I look after all the spray jobs. When it comes to harvesting, Dad and I work together on this.  « 

« One of the reasons we moved to an Agrifac sprayer was for operational efficiency. The Agrifac Endurance II is delivering us about 40% more hectares per tank load because of its larger tank capacity compared to our previous sprayer, it’s also much wider too. Compared to our last sprayer, we’re about 30% wider on the spray boom, meaning we are operating around 80% more efficiently. We’re getting 80% more done per hour with this unit than before! »

« The Agrifac has the latest spraying technology and gives us access to future technology opportunities available. It allows us to push our farming system into that precision ag space. On this Agrifac, we’ve got the AiCPlus individual spot spraying camera technology. We’ve been really impressed with Agrifac’s pulse width modulation system too. This year the PWM turn compensation has been really beneficial especially when used in conjunction with AiCPlus. It’s got a 750-litre rinse tank, which can all be controlled from the cab. We can now do green on brown spraying quite effectively which has saved us several thousands of litres of glyphosate. The opportunity to save costs on certain spraying jobs has been fantastic and now we have got the in-crop stuff sorted, we can start looking at spraying weed in crop and save chemicals in that way too, avoiding off-target spraying. »

« We were confident that the product support was going to be there when choosing Agrifac. The technicians that we have now are really knowledgeable about the product. We are getting more out of every hectare by getting better yields and by crushing less for instance with our wheel tracks, plus we’re getting more profit because we’re spending less on every pass. In the long term, we’re also building a more sustainable business model by keeping our weed pressure down by making sure we’re doing the optimum job. At this stage I wouldn’t change our Agrifac sprayer for anything else. We loved our first one so much that we have gone for a second, so it speaks for itself! »