Change of Strategy for Keith Grower
Last year marked a pivotal moment for Jeremy Lush and his dad Rodney, as they moved from hiring contract harvesters, to purchasing their own header. With a pastoral grazing/irrigation farm located northwest of Keith, and a cropping program to the East of Keith, South Australia, a mixed farming enterprise ensured that the Lush’s had diversity and scale to enable the transition.
The move came after a change in business strategy and operations, adding more land and increasing their cropping program.
This year they have put in wheat, canola, barley, beans and lucerne. “It adds complexity to a business when you’re doing a lot of things, our livestock enterprise is a large component as well, we do have a fair bit on. But the strength in that for us is diversity that reduces risk. If one thing is poor another’s often not.”
Jeremy worked with Kassie van der Westhuizen a harvester specialist, to monitor and adjust the header setup and settings for the coarse grains as well as set his header up for his lucerne crop. “Kassie gave us some MADconcaves™ and OneShot separator grates, we’ll probably kit our header out with that. It worked well, lucerne is a difficult(small) seed to keep in the header so you’re always going to have some loss, but we had a 40% reduction in losses and very little cracked grain. In lucerne we get paid a high-quality bonus if our tests are low for cracked and deformed seed. We only need one high quality bonus and it pays for the fit out of the header.”
MADConcaves™ have an innovative bar-and-grate style modular design. After the installation of a main frame which sits in the original concave position, users only need to change out the concave inserts to suit their crops. “I liked the fact that once the main frame is in you only need to change the concave inserts when changing crop types. The inserts are quick to change and they are light, so anyone can lift them in and out.
Reducing losses is always a priority for the Lush’s. Bushel Plus drop tray tests were conducted last year by Kassie van der Westhuizen, measuring the losses out the back of the header. In Jeremy Lush’s lucerne crop, losses were decreased by 40%, from 7% to 4%, after installing MADConcaves™ and changing the separator grates.
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