With soil drift repeatedly causing headaches for croppers during summer months, Laurie Gaston, Amaroo, Kielpa, has tried his hand at coming up with a solution.
Mr Gaston, who leases out 980 hectares on which wheat, barley and canola are grown, has created his own smudge bar, attaching an H iron steel beam to the undercarriage of a John Shearer 40-row wideseeder.
Mr Gaston has built about a dozen smudge bars, with his first one completed eight years ago.
"I build them to level sand and drift, but they are really good to use after floods too, to fill in gutters," he said.
"I saw a smudge bar years and years ago and thought that I wouldn't mind making one of them, so I hunted around until I found a wideseeder to use, and then I started tinkering and building.
"I take all the boxes off (the wideseeder), and I remove the undercarriage and the tynes and floats, and then make a frame up to go underneath, and bolt a big heavy H iron to it."
The H iron smooths the ground as the wideseeder moves along, with the wheels carrying the frame.
It was a bit of guesswork and playing around until it all fitted, but I'm pretty happy with my design now.
- LAURIE GASTON
"The frame pivots in the middle to allow it to follow the contour of the ground, so if you've got a hole, the frame will follow the hole, but the H iron bits I've made, get dragged along and fill up all the holes and levels off mounds of dirt," Mr Gaston said.
Mr Gaston said many farmers have also bought 'homemade' delvers off him, which were used in conjunction with the smudge bar to prepare the ground for seeding.
"Blokes can smudge their country that they've delved, so they can try and drag clay around and incorporate the sand with clay," he said.
While Mr Gaston said the smudge bar is typically only used for "problematic" areas, he said some farmers had used the bar across their entire properties, due to drift being severe.
"If it's rough country then using the smudge bar is pretty slow, but you could probably do a good 40 hectares a day," he said.
"The smudge bar works best in the dry period, the trash has to be brittle so it doesn't bunch up in front of the bar."
Mr Gaston said while some farmers were using notch blades to combat drift, the smudge bar was more time efficient. He said other drift solutions, such as the use of a cultivator with a grader blade, caused more soil disturbance than the smudge bar.
"The smudge bar smooths along the top of the surface, rather than breaking it up," he said.
TINKERING LEADS GASTON TO FIND SUITABLE DESIGN
KIELPA farmer Laurie Gaston has always enjoyed tinkering with machinery, and has made small improvements to his smudge bar designs during the past decade.
Mr Gaston makes his own smudge bars, by attaching an H iron steel beam to the underside of an old wideseeder.
"I think I've got my design right now, it's all sort of evolved over the years with the frame I use, and I've got the undercarriage to where I want it to be, I wouldn't change anything now," he said.
Mr Gaston said he had spent time strengthening the design by adding heavier pulls, and has modified attachment methods to improve the design's longevity.
"We used to weld the H iron onto the bottom of the wideseeder, but now we bolt it so if it wears out you can take it off, turn it over and use the other half of the H iron as well," he said.
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"Because we use the 40 row wideseeder as the frame, you can fold the pull up and I've got another hitch on the end so you can tow it down the road behind a tractor, so instead of it being nine metres wide it can go back to 3m."
Mr Gaston said he had received good feedback about the smudge bars, and he intended to make some more, once he could find some old wideseeders to use for frames.
"It was a bit of guesswork and playing around until it all fitted, but I'm pretty happy with my design now," he said.
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