Efficient High-Moisture Corn Harvesting

00:00 Johnny Rell with the extreme ag. You know, we're out here today working on our superior dryer, kind of getting it ready to go for harvest. 00:05 We're just a few days away. And so, you know, one thing when we were looking at dryers, we were trying to figure out which brand to go with. 00:10 You know, there's multiple brands out there that are mix flow now. Mix flows are so efficient. 00:14 We had to just sit down and figure out which one was the best for us and what we decided to do, 00:17 which one was the simplest. And I really believe superior is one of the simplest dryers out there on the market 00:21 because as you can see here, these blue motors here and one more motor right up here above my hand is the only motors 00:27 that you cannot physically reach by from the ground. But they're all just a little stepladder away. If you have any issues with 'em, 00:32 you got a few bearings up here on the drags, on the meter roll that you gotta grease. But other than that, everything is easily 00:37 accessed from the ground. And I'll just show you how easy it is. We'll walk right around here and look at the fans. 00:42 So we're right here at the fans. You know, we walked around here and we're looking at the fans trying to figure out what we're gonna do maintenance 00:47 wise for the year on these fans. And so we came in here and we'd done a lot of preventive maintenance on 'em, so to say, by checking 'em over. 00:52 And one thing we noticed was our, our belts were getting extremely dry rotted from being out in the sun. 00:56 This side of the dryer is on the south side are facing the south, so the sun bakes them belts all day long. 01:01 So it was an easy fix for us. 'cause once again, everything's on the ground. So we came in here and we replaced our belts. 01:06 That's the first maintenance we've really done on this machine since we got it, other than just some general greasing. 01:10 But even if we did have something major like a motor, you know this machine here has eight fan motors mounted on the bottom. 01:16 I don't have to have a crane come in and help us with this because if you look at it, the fans are mounted right here. 01:20 We can come in just for the standard forklift, pick 'em up, set 'em out if we did have a motor go out. 01:24 And that was a big deal for us. 'cause where we're at the time you get cranes brought in, it could be a 30 minute project 01:29 and you got minimal fees on cranes that they're gonna charge you. And just accessibility, you know, we can come in here, 01:34 we can take the screens off, the shields off here that protect all this, walk through their general maintenance thing in just a few 01:39 minutes 'cause you're not climbing up and down ladders and all that. And so, you know, a lot of my guys like it just 01:43 because they're scared of heights. And like I said, most of the stuff here is mounted on the ground. 01:47 You know, one of the other things we have to kind of look at while we're getting ready to go this year, you raise, you raise your meter roll lever up here, 01:53 you can get straight access to your meter rolls, go in here and clean out any type of debris 01:56 that might be built up on 'em. Other than that, that's really all we do to this machine. So it's a very simple machine to run 02:02 and that's a big reason we went with Superior. They kept it simple. You know, we're still looking at the dryer, doing a little bit 02:11 of maintenance here and we're up here about 10 foot in the air on one of the platforms they provide you. 02:14 And really the only thing we're here looking at is our burner, our burner's, the full length of the dryer here. And every now and then, like when we fill up the dryer 02:21 or something like that, it can get a little corn in it. It's a pretty easy process. You just literally walk down the sides of the burner here, blow it out. 02:27 Any type of ignition problem you have is all right here at your fingertips. So you're not having to crawl inside 02:32 and dig around trying to find anything or dig any debris out to get to it. It's literally as soon as you 02:36 open the door, it's right here. And every now and then, you know, you'll have some stuff get in here when you're filling 02:40 up and you need to get it cleaned out. So it is a simple process and like I said, very little maintenance if any. 02:44 And if it is, it's at our arm's length away. You know, I keep going back to that because so many times, a lot of times companies try 02:50 to complicate it and you're having to climb up and down the dryer to figure out which, which igniter's not working or which motor's out 02:55 and it's, you know, 30 foot in the air because you know, this dryer here is close to 60 foot tall, but everything that's mechanical 03:00 that's moving is on the ground and pretty much anything else is at this first ladder here, at this first platform here. 03:05 And it's all easy to get to and and maintain. So we look forward to cranking this thing up here in a couple days and you know, as far as we can tell, 03:12 we don't have anything that's gonna give us any issues and didn't have to do anything to it other than change out a few belts this year. 03:16 So we'll give it a try.