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Dump Pit For Ear Corn, Silage
"Anyone who's ever handled seed corn on the ear knows that these high moisture nubbins are a lot more difficult to handle than crib corn," says Gail Ohlson, Ohio, Ill., who had a hauling bottleneck on his farm at harvest time until he came up with a fast system to dump high moisture ear corn, silage and other hard-to-handle grains.
Ohlson, who grows seed for Pioneer, harvests ear-corn at 30 to 35% moisture and brings it back to his farm yard in dump wagons for loading into semis. In the past he used a single, conventional flight elevator with a conventional hopper.
"It was very difficult to dump slow enough into the hopper to keep it full without overflowing. Most people use a pitchfork or other tool to rake the ears out but this method is not only slow and hard work, it can damage the corn. So we came up with this system for trouble-free unloading," says Ohlson.
He buried a conventional dry fertilizer spreader in the ground with one end of it cut off. Ears are dumped into the 30 to 40 bu. hopper and carried out the open end of it where they drop into a large hopper at the end of a double-wide set of elevators. The twin elevators carry the ears up and dump them into a waiting semi to be hauled away for drying.
The fertilizer spreader hopper is driven by a hydraulic orbit motor and the elevators by a pto shaft that's tractor-driven. A jackshaft, that runs off the elevator, drives a small hydraulic pump that hooks up to the dump wagon waiting at the unloading pit. This lets the operator stand by the elevators and gradually dump the unloading wagon into the buried hopper.
"It causes less damage to the seed and you can keep a steady flow dumping out of the wagon, It has eliminated our harvest bottleneck and keeps our two 4-row Uni-Pickers going full speed," notes Ohlson.
He notes that his idea could also be used for faster, easier dumping of silage and other grains where needed.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Gail Ohlson, Rt. 1, Ohio, Ill. 61349 (ph 815 875-1593).


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1984 - Volume #8, Issue #4