July 23, 2018
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Regardless of volatile grain prices and varying yields making sure every grain ends up in your tank is smart money. After all, you have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars planting, spraying and nurturing your crops all year; it would be senseless to put in all that time and money just to spit it out the back of your combine. There isn’t much you can do come harvest time to increase yields but there are couple things, and their payoffs can be huge.
Before we get into things you can do, let’s briefly touch on what exactly is grain loss otherwise known as volunteer yield and what causes it. There are two main causes of grain loss, header loss and rotor loss. Today we will focus on the main cause, rotor loss. Rotor loss is defined as grain lost out the back of rotor combines from the combine’s inability to capture all the grain it has taken in. When the rotor combine was introduced in 1975 it was a vast improvement in capacity in speed over conventional combines it replaced but it came with a cost, losing more grain out the back. The loss from rotor combines primarily comes when not enough threshed grain is captured in the concave section and consequently overloading the separator. When the separator cannot handle the amount of material coming in, it becomes overloaded and can’t effectively separate and retain grain from crop material. Ultimately, this unseparated grain is carried out the back of the combine with the crop residue, lost.
Depending on crop varieties, yields and harvest conditions this loss can add up to 2-5 bushels per acre. At $4.97 wheat or even bearish $8.53 soybeans this loss in yield can add up to $25,000+ depending on the size of the operation. Given those numbers, even the smallest farmer can benefit from stopping rotor loss and one of the best solutions is upgrading your combine’s concaves.
There is a plethora of aftermarket combine concaves out there, each offering their own take on how to approach and solve the problem. One you might consider comes from Estes Performance Concaves in their new XPR Concave System. Unlike some of the other combine concave manufacturers their approach to solving rotor loss is pretty simple, thresh sooner more effectively, get more grain out in the concave section so you don’t overload your separator and what do you have to separate, separate better. They claim their XPR combine concaves stops rotor loss and works in all crops so you no longer have to change concaves harvesting one crop to the next. If interested, you can visit them at estesperformanceconcaves.com or call 765-650-4131.
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