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Josh Lade, our Canadian counterpart, was posed the question "You've had the Terminator in use for a year or two now, are you noticing a reduction in the weed growth the following year?" His response was evident in these photos.  Harvested with a Seed Terminator  No Seed Terminator
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Kim gives us a rundown on his farming operation in Lake Grace in Western Australia and how his Seed Terminators fit into their cropping enterprise. Craig Larke runs through his farming operation and how the Seed Terminator performed on both his John Deere's over the 2018 harvest. Ben Hobley, [the man with two Masseys+ST combos] runs through his farming operation and how the Seed Terminator performed on both of his Massey Ferguson 9560's over the 2018 harvest. Jerome Candeloro from Tooday WA talks us through his family farming operation and how the Seed Terminator went over the 2018 harvest.
Has the adoption of the Seed Terminator changed your spraying program, as in the past the wheels of your sprayer would have been running on your high traffic run lines with the chaff mat acting as a dust abatement?Going from putting chaff back on the Controlled Traffic Farming Trams with chaff decks and using the chaff for a dust abatement during the summer spray application, then going to Seed Terminators where we are spreading the chaff load across the cut width. We are seeing a minimal amount of change as the new sprayers are being offered with new tire technology and sizes, therefore we’ve gone with the 420 tires on both new sprayers, whereas before they were on 480’s. Reducing the footprint which in turn reduces the amount of soil disturbance equaling less dust circulation. In addition that if we had to do a double knock with dry conditions we can always perform the first spray on the high traffic run lines that we normally would spray on, while shifting to a low traffic run line to perform the second pass again reducing the amount of dust Do you feel that reducing weed seeds, harvest losses / volunteers retained your soil moisture this year?We've had no moisture anyway! It definitely helps, the summer weed pressures aren't there; no broadies, turnips, we don’t have radish, certainly controls all those summer weed volunteers. Doesn’t control melons, we haven't worked out how to put them through the Terminator yet. How has this affected the time taken to clean up your new blocks?It's certainly speeded up the cleanup process, we’ve been able to get two controls in one year. Just having that second Harvest control is certainly a win win. How has the Terminator affected your harvester setup?With the newer header and new mills, never really affected us at all. Plenty of horsepower and the mill screens being opened up certainly reduced the horsepower significantly, less wear and still getting the maximum kill. Would you say the Seed Terminator is proof in the paddockYes, we have no ryegrass in header trails anymore, so what is going through the machine is definitely controlled. It will just be the hard seed that will take 4-5 years to try and combat, but were slowly getting on top of it. Is there anything else that is ST pro & cons?It's definitely a cheap alternative for controlling ryegrass when chemicals are costing $35-40/ha. I believe it's paid for itself in 2 years and it's certainly a very handy tool to control the weed seeds. Looking at cost of operation and cost of the Seed Terminator, what are you putting that back to harvester maintenance or sprayers?Both, our running cost on wear and tear $4.50/ha that's to replace every mill, every screen, and throughout the year. Fuel usage is only a couple bucks a ha, it's not slowing us down, only need to do one less spraying operation and were already $5/ha in front and that goes towards the capital of the machine itself. 
Can you give us a rundown on the farm's history?Mum and Dad were from Balaklava SA, they were looking to expand and came to look at the Wyalkatchem area in 1968. They purchased ‘Baladeen’ and moved over in 1969. I came back from Uni in 1992 and still live on the home farm with my wife and two boys aged 8 and 9. We started out with clover pastures and ran sheep with cropping, but now 100% cropping. Our country is very sandy and we have issues with erosion so are moving to CTF and using deep ripping. Being a sandy farm, potassium and nitrogen are the big factors so we need to retain the stubble where we can. What HWSC methods have you used previously?We did chaff carts back in the 2000's for about 5 years, and then windrow burning after that, we were considering going back to chaff carts but were given the opportunity to join the 2017 Farmer Research Partner Group with Seed Terminator. There was lots of talk in WA in 2017 after their 2016 run; we discussed it with our consultants who had ties with Chris Robinson from Kojonup Farmanco and made contact with Andrew Todd who is one of the 2016 pioneers and then put in an application online. How did MY17 and MY18 compare?2017 was our first year with the Seed Terminator, we had it on our Case 7230 and it was pretty much running at 100% engine load all the time. We changed over to a new Case 7240 halfway through the 2018 harvest and the new machine did about 100 hours with the Seed Terminator. The 7230 needed replacing, it wasn’t a decision based purely around the Seed Terminator but for CTF reasons as well. I definitely noticed the reduction in power on the old header, and with the new header, I didn’t even notice it was on the back. The power draw is down and even after 350 hours cutting at around beer can height or lower the screens are still good to go. The new header with MY18 version was running at 80-90% engine load and even pushing into some really good crop, going uphill, in deep ripped country with huge straw loads it was no worries at all. Any particular challenges this season?I was worried about a new machine going into harvest and worried about wear and extra engine load, (the main issues we had in 2017), but Nick has certainly sorted those things out. We had more straw going through the machine, but no real challenges, it came off beautifully. It was a good season for us this year, best tonnage we've ever had, I certainly can't complain. What has not burning meant for your operation? The biggest plus has been being about to do other operations in February and March; liming and ripping are two big jobs that you can concentrate on rather than splitting time between those and burning as well. It's hard to work out exactly, but it saves our operation a good couple of weeks; two people, two utes, we’d concentrate mainly on wheat stubbles, but occasional canola and barley as well. Burning seemed to drag on for weeks and weeks, its a lot of hours and a few thousand dollars, maybe $5000, but burning into the evenings, doing odd hours, it's just a stressful job. Chaff carts were worse as they'd burn for 3-4 days and cause escape fires and were overall more stressful than windrow burning. We cleaned things up pretty well in 5 years and then thought it was a good time to get out of it. Have you tested for Herbicide Resistance on your property?Our herbicide resistance test hasn't come back yet, we did our first one at harvest time this year. There was quite a bit of ryegrass this year as everything went into dry and then everything came up at the same time with the rain. We’ve definitely noticed were having to use bigger and bigger rates of chemicals to keep on top of ryegrass. The Seed Terminator is just another tool for weed management, I hope we see a reduction in the seed bank over the next three years.
What do you see as the future of this technology? The future is exciting. We don’t see the concept changing much, however we see wearing parts lasting longer and the power consumption becoming less.  ^ Nick Berry, Jamie Slarke , Harry Slarke and Kim Slarke checking out the Seed Terminator
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