Written by Andrea Barnard Thursday, 17 June 2010 14:53
THE development of the Harrington Seed Destructor (HSD), which processes and pulverises common weeds, is a story of scientific trial and error coming together with serendipitous relationships.
HSD developer Ray Harrington began his research when changing from a stock program to a total crop program 15 years ago and seeing the weed resistance faced by other grain growers in WA.
“I did some research into hammermills as a way to destroy weeds and replace the traditional chaff cart system which has issues of its own,” Mr Harrington says.
“Agmaster built my first mill. I brought it home and got some chaff from the Wheatbelt to put through it, planted it and put it all in plots and watered it and couldn’t get any sense out of it at all.
“Then I happened to cross WAHRI (Western Australian Herbicide Resistance Initiative) Director, Professor Stephen Powles path at a reunion of the original WA No-Till Farmers Association committee.
“We talked about it for a couple of hours and in the end he put fourth year honours student, Jason Ellerton, on the project to check the efficacy of the mill.
“They set about a test regime with replicated trials which involved putting 50 litres of chaff in the mill and salting it with a thousand coloured rye grass seeds.
“Then they ran the mill at 700, 900, 1100 and 1300 revolutions per minute (rpm). 700 didn’t do anything.
“At 1300 rpm we got a kill curve of 87 percent. Of the 13 percent that was left, only around 30 percent germinated.”
Mr Harrington says these trials and WAHRI’s funding, whose accreditation he felt was needed before approaching the farming community, were the catalyst to get out of the static situation on to the back of the header.
“It took me and local farmer Ron Knapp, two years to do this. It was a hell of a challenge and at any point it could easily have gone either way.”
With five replicated trials under its belt, the HSD has since attracted additional funding from the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) and continues to improve on the rate at which it collects and destroys weed seeds.
“The latest data from WAHRI is that ryegrass introduced directly into the mill at 1400 rpm is 98.5 percent destroyed.
“We’ve actually got the ability to take the mill up to 1600 rpm so we may even start looking at getting 100 percent.”
Mr Harrington says he would not have been able to get the HSD off the ground without the help and drive of some of WA’s leading agricultural industry specialists, scientists and technicians, Mike and Geoff Glenn, Prof Stephen Powles, Jason Ellerton, Mark Lowrings, Don Hair, Ron Knapp, WAHRI, GRDC and Paul Miebusch.
Further information : Ray Harrington, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
