Geeraning Pastural Co

Hi, I’m Kim Graham, Operations Manager for Geeraning Pastural Co, located in North-Eastern Wheatbelt, Western Australia. We are a fully arable farm and grow all kinds of different cereals and rotation crops, including canola, legumes and wheat. 

In the past, we have had a couple of problems with the weather. We were noticing more and more summer storms and heavier rainfall in the summer, so we decided 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 time constraints plus we then had reliability issues with the electronics on the boom of our previous sprayer. I found that frustrating and it was very time consuming, limiting our uptime in the field. As a result, this was leading to less time with my family and less time to run the business, which as a result 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 initially drew me to the Agrifac Condor was the working width and I thought that if the boom is 55 meters, it would suit our tramlining. It was very exciting to see all the things that we were looking for in a sprayer, especially noticing that the layout and design of the boom wouldn’t cause 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 8,000-litre tank for the self-propelled machines which is exactly what we were looking for. 

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

The key benefits for us must 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 and we have a lot less electronics on the machine. The fuel savings has been reduced too 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 1,000 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.