Geeraning Pastural Co

Hi, I’m Kim Graham, Operations Manager for Geeraning Pastural Co, which is settled in North-Eastern Wheatbellt, Western Australia. We have no livestock on our farm. We have all kinds of different cereals and rotation crops, including canola and legumes and cereals.

We had a couple of problems with the weather. There were more summer storms and more rainfall in the summer. So we needed to be spraying at the same time as we were harvesting. We were working with a tractor which was doing our chaser bin work, chasing the header at the same time as it needed to be spraying. We were under lots of pressure with time plus we then had some reliability issues with the electronics on the boom of our previous sprayer. I found that frustrating and it was very time consuming. This was leading to less time with my family and less time to run the business. So that got us looking towards a self-propelled sprayer.

We went to the Dowerin Field day and when we were walking through the back gate, we saw the Agrifac Condor. The thing that drew me to the Agrifac Condor was the width initially and I thought that if the boom is 55 meters, it would suit our tram lining. It was very inspirational to see all the things that we were looking for, like a banana set up on the boom so there weren’t going to be any structural issues. We needed a boom that was going to be able to keep a nice steady level height above our crops. We always had an issue with finding a self-propelled sprayer with a good tank size for us, but Agrifac has an 8000 litre tank for the self-propelled machines.

We were lucky enough to have the hundredth Agrifac Condor built for us. The machine was very unique! There are a few extra features put on the machine for the hundredth celebration for the Agrifac Condor. What we took in consideration for buying an Agrifac machine is the serviceability and the access to parts and back up parts. Agrifac have looked after one of the local mechanics to deliver service for us. They are only within half an hour of here and they stock parts for us.

The key benefits for us have to be the tank size and the width of the machine. We are currently 50% wider than our old machine. Also the reliability of the machine has gone up, we have  a lot less electronics on the machine. The fuel savings has been reduced which is good and we are working more efficiently with the new Condor. We are getting across the paddocks a lot more and we don’t have to do that half-dead run around each paddock to get into our tram.

Our time efficiency has gone up since we are using the Agrifac Condor, we are between thirty and forty minutes with the old boom and with this machine we have around an eight minute load time and we are down about 1000 litres per minute. Another key benefit is the road speed, we used to go 40kph and now it is up to 60kph which is another 50 per cent gained so that all adds up.