FOR Mallee farmer John Mead, the “DuckFoot™ Paddle Tine”, has been an essential tool for increasing harvester front feeding and productivity.
In November 2022, Steve Kastning, inventor of the DuckFoot™, visited Australia to help growers reduce front loss with their John Deere, Macdon, Case and Claas header fronts.
Steve, along with Brian Legg, Chris Bazeley and Michael Bailey from Primary Sales Australia, spent time in the paddock with growers like John showing them how to set-up their fronts to improve productivity in heavy cereal as well as light pulse crop conditions.
“(Steve and Brian) set the front up for me, I just had it on the normal setting of the reel, and he just set it right back (less aggressive), and it certainly made a difference, just that much smoother to feed,” John said.
John used the Duckfoot across their entire cropping program.
“They (DuckFoot) were a great help in terms of feeding the crop into the front and also it reduced the heads that we lost, we decreased our reel speed and increased our ground speed,” he said.
In the trials conducted with Steve Kastning and Primary Sales, John’s ground speed was increased by 28 per cent.
The Duckfoot is proven
to reduce front loss by up to 75
per cent – a simple way for growers to leave less grain on the ground.
Research from Grains Research Development Corporation’s ‘Measuring Harvester Losses’ 2022–23 found that nationally more than $435 million worth of grain loss in paddocks was from front losses alone (this is an extrapolated value).
Primary Sales Australia has a wide range of products designed to improve your harvest productivity.
Visit them at site 137 at this year’s Mallee Machinery Field Days.
