14 October 2024
The Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) and fire safety experts are encouraging growers to implement practical measures to reduce the risk of harvester fires over the coming weeks.
Recent GRDC Harvester Set-up Workshops run across Australia’s grain growing regions have highlighted the importance of harvester hygiene and maintenance, especially when harvesting more volatile crops such as lentils.
About seven per cent of harvesters start a fire each year, in a range of crop types including cereals and pulses. In these cases, one in 10 will cause significant damage to the machine or surrounding crop.
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Kondinin Group research engineer Ben White presented at the workshops and said growers should maintain high levels of hygiene and pay attention to ongoing maintenance of machinery throughout harvest.
“Bearing failures are in many cases responsible for fires starting, so regular monitoring of bearing operating temperatures is important,” Mr White said.
“Operators should be conducting regular clean downs during harvest and exercising particular caution when harvesting leafy pulse crops, as these are renowned for dust volatility.
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“In areas where growers are harvesting frost-affected crops, these crops may create higher levels of fine dust which can make the harvester work harder, resulting in higher exhaust gas temperatures, adding to the risk of fires.”
Mr White offers the following 10 tips to improve harvester fire safety:
The GRDC publication Reducing Harvester Fires: the Back Pocket Guide provides an easy-to-read harvester fire reduction checklist. The GRDC podcast Preventing harvester fires in lentils has relevant tips and information for growers (regardless of crop type).
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In addition, a recent GRDC Farm Business Updates webinar on Pre-Harvest On Farm Preparations is now available to watch online.
GRDC has also released a new Harvester Setup Guide – optimising harvest losses with contributions from a range of third-party independent harvest optimisation experts based on their experiences. The guide covers measuring harvest losses, reducing header front losses, feeder house set-up, threshing system set-up, the cleaning area, harvest weed seed control and safety.