Alvan Blanch: where simplicity and efficiency combine

For Victorian farmer Dan Coulthard, one essential piece of farm equipment is helping him increase and spread his farm income throughout the year whether he’s on farm or not.

He’s a director of a family business, Bluevale Agri Co, based near Wangaratta, in north-eastern Victoria. Dan farms wheat, barley, canola, “the odd bean”, summer corn, and sorghum on 445-hectares.

Investing in a grain drier has been a game changer for his 20-year-old operation.

 “The drier allows us to harvest our grain crops earlier. It saves us overwintering the corn so that we can use that field for something else like a cover crop or a grain crop”, says Dan.

His current drier – donning the Alvan Blanch brand – allowed him to process 2800 tonnes of corn and 700 tonnes of sorghum last year. Dan harvests corn at 26 per cent moisture; the Alvan Blanch drier will get that down to 14 per cent. The drier heats the air up to 95^oC with the fan designed to move the hot air through the grain on the bed, the DF drier is both efficient and simple to operate. And there’s a bonus – the “nice, gentle drying process” for that seed means it smells like popcorn. For the sorghum, it comes off the field as high as 20 per cent moisture, and, setting the drier’s temperature to 36^oC, he’ll dry it down to 11 per cent moisture.

He sells to seed companies, or for stock feed, and, in the past, to the company that makes CCs corn chips.

“We also export, so it goes all over the place; for example, we’ve sold early corn to Japan and have just loaded a boat to send a lot off to Korea,” says Dan.

“With the dollar value changing with commodity prices, it’s all about timing. So, if we can harvest earlier in the season when the paddocks aren’t wet, that’s a lot less straining on the harvester and the soil as well. By doing that, we get money coming in, spread throughout the year. We’re not carrying debt through the winter.”

And that’s important because Bluevale is a lean three-person operation – Dan, his father, and an employee.

Five years ago, he bought his current Alvan Blanch drier, a Model DF22000 with a capacity of around 22 to 25 tonnes per hour in wheat. It’s had “15,000 tonnes of grain through it” so far, yet it has only needed minor tweaks.

“I’ve had to replace an igniter on one of the burners.

Bluevale services the equipment in-house, and it takes just two hours.

“You check the six grease nipples, then change the burner jets to tune them and check the chain tension. That’s it, and you’re away.

“We went for this brand of drier because, as farmers, we aren’t always locked into the same crops due to the price, weather, and market availability. The ability of this drier to do seed crops, grain crops, and coarse grains gives us versatility. We don’t know what we’ll end up growing but will always chase a better crop to improve our business.”

Dan describes himself as an “early adopter” of Alvan Blanch’s equipment. He’s onto his second drier. For his first, he opted for a portable model.

“We bought that nine years ago thinking we’d do contract drying. Someone saw it and wanted it, so we sold it. The money we made from contracting with it helped pay for an upgrade – we replaced the portable model with a fixed drier to integrate into our silo system.”

His current drier, which Dan assembled himself, ticks many boxes for the business.

“This one is much better for us because we have an unloading facility. You can drive over a pit, making it easy and fast to unload. Then there are conveyors and bucket elevators linking the system.

“It’s fully automated - I’m confident we get it set right, and I can just go home for the night. I’ll return in the morning, and it’s either still running or has shut down, but that only happens if it’s run out of grain.”

And, if he wants, he can check on the drier via his mobile phone and make changes.

“It was all available when we bought it, but I only got all that going two years ago. At the time, I’d been living off the property, so it saved me driving half an hour to make a change to the drier.”

When he returns to the machine after it’s dried its load, Dan’s chuffed he won’t have another task cleaning up.

“My Alvan Blanch machine is very clean – it just blows all that out the back. It gets caught in the dust house.”

“Other driers expel the air differently and create a lot of dust, chaff, and stubble, and it just flows out of the machine and grows everywhere. I’ve seen other driers having a metre of stuff all around them, which is a horrendous fire risk.”

Speaking of heat, his Alvan Blanch machine offers versatility in temperature settings. It can go from really high to low temperatures for different crops yet maintains the quality. Drying a particular seed crop at too high a temperature will “wreck germination”.

For now, Bluevale uses the drier for sorghum and corn but plans to expand. The business has a nice ‘side hustle’ doing contract drying for forage grain and sorghum, which it picked up the last two seasons.

“Those growers bring the grain to us, and they take it away”, says Dan.

While the drier is a staple of his farming operation, Dan has almost come to think of the people from Alvan Blanch as family.

“We’ve actually become really good friends with the Australian distributors – Jim and Jane – and the technician that comes out from the headquarters in England. He finds his way to us and stays with us for a while; calls the kids for Christmas, too.”

Meanwhile, Western Australian farming operation RD & CL Parsons is onto its third Alvan Blanch drier. For the past 60 years, the business has been running mixed cropping and sheep on a 9300-hectare property on the south coast.

One of the farm’s directors, Trent Parsons, says they had been using two 40-year-old Alvan Blanch driers but, five years ago decided to invest in an updated machine for drying canola, wheat, and barley.

“We installed the standalone Alvan Blanch drier ourselves, including a lot of the site works and all the grain handling equipment that goes with it. It’s an excellent product. The drier came with an installation booklet and we just worked our way through that.”

Trent’s farm has a DF22000 that processes 22 tonnes of wheat per hour, reducing moisture from 15 per cent to 12 per cent.

“And that’s on a day when it’s 20^oC ambient temperature and 70 per cent humidity,” he says.

RD & CL Parsons didn’t opt for the computerised, automated model.

“We have a control board, and that’s been excellent because it’s all off-the-shelf parts, so if anything goes wrong, we just ask for parts.

“The grain drier has barely had any maintenance, and one of the reasons we went with Alvan Blanch is that we clean out the drier every year and fire it up for a harvest, and away it goes.”

The drier’s capacity was a pleasant surprise, he says.

“You always question the manufacturer’s quote about the capacity, but what they said it would do, it did exactly that.”

And this is where money talks. Trent has two class-9 headers and says having the Alvan Blanch drier is “the equivalent of another header”.

Another bonus is being able to switch to different grain types without emptying the grain drier.

“There are operating manuals, so it’s pretty easy to adjust the parameters on it as the manual says, and away you go. We love their simplicity. There are very few moving parts and minimal electronics. Without it, we’d be required to buy another header.”

Queensland farmer Brian Greg also bought his Alvan Blanch drier five years ago.

“It was to replace a smaller drier – 20 tonnes – that we’d bought 15 years ago? that wasn’t the same brand. We just had too much grain to dry, and the old one was too labour intensive, took too long, and that company didn’t have a suitable size one for our operations.

“I went to a summer grains conference and checked out the Alvan Blanch stand there, had a chat, talked to a few other farmers, and decided it was the one we wanted. It’s simple to operate, offers low-cost drying, and can run on its own,” he says.

Brian is on about 6700-hectares and on his family farm, Kolara Farming, 900 kilometres north of Brisbane. It grows sorghum, corn, wheat, and chickpeas and runs cross-bred Brahman-Angus cattle.

He’ll mainly use the drier for corn and sorghum. It does up to 30 tonnes per hour, but usually, he sets it to do 25 tonnes per hour. That compares to his old machine that took an achingly slow four hours to process 20 tonnes.

“Alvan Blanch is an excellent company to work with. They’re friendly, really approachable, and, if we have a problem, they’ll sort it out for us.”

The company solved one problem: helping Brian “save a lot of crop”.

“This year, because we have a drier, we harvested all of our crop around Anzac Day and had it all harvested without any sprouting. However, most of our neighbours didn’t get it off - it sprouted and lost a lot of value.

“Thanks to our drier, we can harvest about four-to-five weeks earlier than what we’d do if we didn’t have a drier – it reduces the risk.”

It means Kolara can get on with its business of delivering its crops straight to Grain Corp at the port, some 245 kilometres away.

Kolara Farming had an issue about seeds that aren’t even going through the drier. Brian said that because he has to harvest chickpeas so close to the ground, the harvester picks up a lot of soil with the crop.

“So, the only change we’ve made to the drier set up is adding a cleaner. We use the same elevator, but there’s a separate operation to clean all the dust out from the chickpeas.”

Dan, Trent, and Brian represent just three of the farming businesses that Alvan Blanch has supported. The UK-headquartered company, with a long history in manufacturing crop drying solutions and with globally recognised awards, Alvan Blanch have been servicing the Australian market since the early 1960. The business has been servicing its two largest markets, Australia and New Zealand, since the 1960s.

Australian Distributor – Alvan Blanch Australia, is based in South East Queensland, providing concept and design for grain plants, co-ordinating proposals and deliveries across the nation.

The local operation has been selling, assembling, and maintaining its two key models – the DF & CD models with much success. The Double-Flow drier is ideal for granular crops such as wheat, barley, hemp seed, almonds, and more. Meanwhile, the Conveyor Drier suits bulk products such as grass, woodchip, banana, lemon myrtle leaf, dubosia leaf (all being dried in Australia in CD systems).

Company website: www.alvanblanchgroup.com/asia-pacific/

Company email address: jim.duncan@alvanchblanch.com.au