Cutting-edge tech put to the test

In 2023, Sam Johns grew 1800 hectares of Scepter, Calibre and Rockstar wheat and Highland lentils at Maitland with his harvest program lasting eight weeks and average tonnages of between 4t/ha and 6.5t/ha for wheat.

Finishing up on the morning of December 8, Mr Johns said he had a relatively smooth harvest, with 10 days written-off due to wet weather, and was able to finish just hours before 70 millimetres of rain fell in two days.

Previously running a Seed Terminator on a S-Series header, he had an X9 Seed Terminator prototype in 2022, before the production model was pre-released last year.

"We had one on the S680 for two seasons and we liked what it was doing for our ryegrass problem, but they limit the capacity of the header no matter what you do, that's just a byproduct of doing another operation at the same time," he said.

"The X9 was the latest technology for John Deere and we wanted to get into that relatively early, so in 2022 we upgraded from our S-Series.

"It's a higher capacity harvester, it's more refined, it's a quieter machine, it's got a lot of great features which worked with our operation.

"But one of our goals was to have a harvester that would reap at the capacity of the S-Series without the terminator on it, and the X9 with a Seed Terminator on it has about the same efficiency as an S Series without, so it was the obvious choice for us."

Mr Johns said the X9 header ranged between 4.5 to 7.5 kilometres per hour in wheat - depending on the size of the crop - while speeds reached between 6-8.5km/ha in the lentil crop, limited by terrain rather than the machine.

"The overall limitation was horsepower, which was a function of the amount of material being put through both the separator and the Seed Terminator," he said.

"The Seed Terminator seemed to comfortably handle whatever the harvester could handle."

Mr Johns said ryegrass was a huge issue for himself and other farmers in the region, and traditional control tactics weren't as efficient.

"We've done all the traditional things of hay baling, windrow burning, broadacre burning - all of those different things as well as trying to rotate different chemicals and different crops," he said.

"While hay was working for us, we're not hay producers and we don't have baling equipment, so the return just isn't there when you're not geared up for it."

Mr Johns said his main goal with the Seed Terminator was to stop the spread of ryegrass patches in his paddocks.

"We're certainly not eliminating ryegrass by any means, but we're not spreading those bad patches across the paddock every year that were growing by 50 or 100 metres in each direction," he said.

"We've seemed to have frozen those and any new patches remain isolated because I'm pretty confident everything that does get into the harvester and goes through the terminator is killed.

"But we're still not capturing all the ryegrass because it has a certain amount that lies flat on the ground and goes underneath the cutter bar no matter how low we reap."

Mr Johns said although the attachment was working well to eliminate ryegrass, he could not throw out everything in his toolkit just yet.

"I have a feeling we'll end up with the ryegrass that lays flat as the dominant population," he said.

"That's the beauty of ryegrass, it always finds a way to adapt.

"So, we still have to keep doing a range of different operations to keep the ryegrass under control."

Now four seasons in, Mr Johns said he is pleased with the attachment's overall performance but was hopeful it would soon be integrated into a header to increase efficiency.

"Seed Terminator have done a great job of adding something into an existing header that was designed and built with no consideration for putting an attachment on, " he said.

"With the first Seed Terminator we had on the S-Series, we were really limited by what it could manage.

"There was a fair bit of green material that year, it could not handle it well and the terminator was what we were driving to the whole time, but the new upgrades have been hugely beneficial and it feels like a different attachment now on the X9.

"At the moment, it does compromise the performance of the header through loss of horsepower, but it's really doing three operations at once - in reaping the crop, destroying the weed seeds and preparing for next year's crop - as well by reaping low and making it easier for the air seeder to come in the following year.

"If we were doing all of those things separately, we'd be spending more time and using more machinery to get the job done, so we think it balances out well enough."

Looking to seeding this year, Mr Johns said he had already sprayed the entire farm following recent rain events.

"We've had huge amounts of germination after all of the rain we've had in the last two months or so," he said.

"But, with the forecast previously predicting a hot, dry summer, we're happy to get the subsoil moisture put us in a good position ahead of seeding this year.

"I think the summer rains were part of the reason we got off to such a good start this year - going into this year, we thought we'd have a completely dry profile but the recent rain has definitely put some moisture in."